The hanging of wanted anti-Iran Sunni separatist leader Abdul Malik Rigi in Tehran in June 2010, within five months of his capture, attracted dim media attention then. Fourteen years after he founded an armed group, Jundallah — rechristened as Jaish al-Adl (JAA) or the ‘Army of Justice’ in 2012 following a ban by the U.S. — brought two major military powers, Iran and Pakistan, to the brink of war last week.
Rigi was believed to be behind the killing of 154 members of the Iranian Armed Forces between 2003 and 2010 in southwest Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan region. In 2010, Iranian fighter jets forced the landing of a passenger aircraft to arrest Rigi, as he was travelling from the UAE to Kyrgyzstan.
“The only thing we ask of the Iranian government is to let us be citizens. We want to have the same rights as the Iranian Shias. That’s it. We do not want discrimination between Sunnis and Shias in this country,” Rigi was quoted as saying in an interview with Al-Arabiya in 2008.
Rigi belonged to the biggest tribe, the Rigis, from the Sistan-Baluchestan region, which is spread over 1,81,578 sq. km, slightly smaller than Karnataka. It is this sparsely populated region (2.8 million) that has posed the Shia-majority Iran’s a major secessionist challenge. Rigi is from Iran’s minority Sunni Muslims and wanted to re-establish Balochistan, which is currently split between Pakistan and Iran.
The JAA triggered a rare skirmish between Iran and Pakistan, which saw missiles being fired from both sides, killing at least 11 civilians, as per the official figures released by these countries. Iran claimed it attacked training camps of the JAA inside Pakistan. In retaliation, Pakistan claimed to have carried out attacks on militants of the Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF). The two countries accused each other of providing safe havens to these militants in their respective territories. Pakistan accuses the BLF of attacking its security forces inside the country.
At present, Salahuddin Farooqui heads the JAA, which is believed to be behind the training of smaller Sunni militant groups to unleash attacks inside Iran.
Iran blames the outfit for the killing of 11 people in an attack on a police station in December 2023. The group was being watched closely by the Iranian security agencies following a suicide bombing on a bus, killing 27 members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in 2019. It has even carried out attacks on Shia civilians, banks and stores.
Al-Qaeda links
Iran, on many occasions, accused the U.S., Britain, Israel, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia of supporting Baloch separatists. However, Western countries accuse the group, including Farooqui, of having ties with al Qaeda. Experts say the JAA’s ideology is derived from the orthodox literature of Salafis, close to Saudi Arabia’s clergy. The JAA claims it is fighting only against Iran, for the rights of the Balochis.
Till the 1870s, erstwhile Balochistan spread over the parts of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The region’s history has grown complex with time, in the backdrop of a series of rulers from Afghan, Arab, Greek, Indian, Mongol, Persian and Turkic empires. However, local dynasties managed varying degrees of autonomy or independence between the 11th and 17th centuries. The JAA claims it’s fighting to “secure recognition of Baluchi cultural, economic, and political rights from the Iranian Government”.
The JAA is emerging as a formidable outfit because Sistan-Baluchestan is largely mountainous and shares a 322-km border with Sunni-dominated Afghanistan and a 925-km border with Sunni-majority Pakistan. Alexander marched through this region to reach India in 326 BC.
The JAA came under the scanner of Indian security agencies following the abduction of an Indian, Kulbhushan Jadhav. The group allegedly traded Jadhav, who is now facing a trial in Pakistan, to Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to pump money into the ranks in 2016. Jadhav’s capture and the subsequent claim by the Pakistan government that he was a spy soured the relations between India and Pakistan further.
