(Reuters) - Arab insurgents blew up
a gas pipeline in Iran last week
and dedicated the attack to their brothers in arms in Syria,
highlighting how the Syrian civil war is spreading into a region-wide
proxy conflict that could blow back onto Iran.
The blast, two days after new President Hassan Rohani took office,
hit a pipeline feeding a petrochemicals plant in the city of Mahshahr in
Iran's southwest, home to most of its oil reserves and to a population
of ethnic Arabs, known as Ahwazis for the main town in the area.
The Ahwazi Arabs are a small minority in mainly ethnic Persian Iran,
some of whom see themselves as under Persian "occupation" and want
independence or autonomy. They are a cause celebre across the Arab
world, where escalating ethnic and sectarian rivalry with Iran now fuels
the wars in Syria and Iraq and is behind political unrest from Beirut
to Bahrain.
Tehran dismisses any suggestion that discontent is rife among its
Arab minority, describing such reports as part of a foreign plot to
steal the oil that lies beneath its Gulf coastal territory. Iranian news
agencies reported a fire on the gas pipeline last week but said its
cause was unknown
There has been unrest in the area for many years, and now some
Ahwazis see themselves as part of a larger struggle between Shi'ite Iran
and the Sunni-ruled Arab states across the Gulf, which back opposing
sides in the Syrian civil war.
Although the overwhelming majority of Ahwazis are Shi'ites, some say
they sympathise with the mainly-Sunni rebels fighting Syria's
Iran-backed President Bashar al-Assad.
"Our land is occupied and the Syrian people are in the shadow of a
dictatorial regime that serves Iranian interests in the region," said an
Ahwazi activist speaking from inside the region. "If Bashar falls, Iran
falls: that is the slogan of the Ahwazis," he said.
ARABISTAN
The Islamic Republic would almost certainly outlast Assad's downfall.
But the slogan nonetheless shows how events in Syria are stirring a
latent threat to stability in one of the world's most resource-rich
corners: the Iranian province of Khuzestan, once known as Arabistan for
its Arab majority.
An Ahwazi militant group said it had sabotaged the pipeline with
homemade explosive devices, targeting Iran's economy in revenge for the
authorities' mistreatment of ethnic Arabs and for Tehran's roles in
Syria and Iraq.
"This heroic operation is a message to the Persian enemy that the
national Ahwazi resistance has the ability and initiative to deliver
painful blows to all the installations of the Persian enemy, inside
Ahwaz and out," the Mohiuddin Al Nasser Martyrs Brigade, which has
claimed responsibility for previous attacks on energy infrastructure,
said in a statement.
The group threatened to intensify its activities in coordination with
members of Iran's Kurdish and Baluch minorities, some of whom also
complain of unfair treatment.
Arabistan was a semi-autonomous sheikhdom until 1925, when it was
brought under central Iranian government control and later renamed,
marking the start of what some Ahwazis describe as a systematic campaign
to Persianise if not obliterate them.
According to the CIA Factbook, Arabs make up about 2 percent of
Iran's population, suggesting there are around 1.6 million of them, a
small minority in a country with a Persian majority and much larger
Azeri and Kurdish communities, among others.
At their most ambitious, Ahwazis want an independent state stretching
beyond the borders of Khuzestan, which is at the head of the strategic
Gulf waterway and shares a border with Iraq.
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's attempt to annex Khuzestan triggered
the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s in which a million people were killed.
"Liberating" the Ahwazis was a slogan for Saddam and the Arab states
that supported him.
In 1980, with Iraqi support, Ahwazi separatists took 26 hostages in
Iran's London embassy. British special forces stormed the embassy after a
six day siege; two hostages and five captors were killed.
Thousands of Ahwazis crossed into Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and
some were given land, but they are no longer welcome under the
Shi'ite-dominated government that rose to power after U.S.-led forces
invaded in 2003 and toppled Saddam.
Exploited by avowed secular Arab nationalists like Saddam, Ahwaz is
now being woven into the sectarian narrative revolving around the Syrian
conflict, which has polarised Sunnis and Shi'ites. Ahwazis are
overwhelmingly Shi'ite, but in recent years there has been some
conversion to Sunni Islam among them.
"I converted for political reasons and I think most are like that,"
said the activist contacted by Reuters in Khuzestan, who decided to
become Sunni during a trip to a Shi'ite shrine in the Iranian city of
Mashhad after hearing several ethnic Persians travelling on the same
train mock Arabs.
Iran's Deputy Minister for Arab and Foreign Affairs Hossein Amir
Abdollahian told reporters in Kuwait there were no Sunnis in Khuzestan.
Nevertheless, Sunnis across the Arab world have taken up the Ahwazi
cause with zeal.
From a stage in the Iraqi province of Anbar, where Sunnis have
rallied for months against a Shi'ite leadership they denounce as a
stooge of Iran, lawmaker Ahmed al-Alwani roared: "We tell our people in
Ahwaz: we are coming!"
In Bahrain, whose Sunni monarchy blames Tehran for fomenting protests
by the Shi'ite majority on the island since 2011, a street in the
capital has been renamed "Arabian Ahwaz Avenue".
A bearded presenter on Saudi-based hardline Sunni pan-Arab TV channel
al-Wesal burst into tears recounting the sufferings of the Ahwazi
people: "We must stand with them as Muslims! They are calling us," he
said after composing himself.
One battalion of the rebel Free Syrian Army is called the "Ahwaz
Brigade", although the group says there are no foreign fighters in its
ranks.
"We have relations with different factions of the (Syrian) rebels,"
said Habib Nabgan, the former head of a coalition of Ahwazi parties
whose armed wing carried out last week's pipeline attack.
"They need information, which we give them, and we need some of their
expertise, so there is cooperation and that is developing," he told
Reuters via telephone from Denmark, where he took refuge in 2006.
PROTESTS
The use of Ahwaz for sectarian and Arab nationalist agendas has
served to justify repression by Iranian authorities, which say they face
a foreign plot to control the country's natural resources. Tehran has
accused Britain, Israel and Saudi Arabia of provoking unrest in
Khuzestan.
Although the bulk of Iran's 137 billion barrel oil reserves lie
beneath the soil of Khuzestan, most Ahwazis struggle to scratch a living
off the land they lay claim to.
"We get nothing from the oil and gas fields except smoke (from the
refineries)," said activist Taha al-Haidari, in footage filmed secretly
in prison before he was executed along with two of his brothers and a
friend.
They were arrested after taking part in a protest in 2011 and
convicted of "enmity against God" and "corruption on earth", having
confessed under duress to murder and being members of an armed
separatist group, one of them said in the video.
The authenticity of the tape, which activists said was smuggled out of jail, could not be independently verified.
Iran dismisses Ahwazi grievances and says reports of their
mistreatment are mere propaganda, often pointing out that a former
Iranian minister of defence was an ethnic Arab.
A document purporting to be a secret government directive leaked in
2005 described a policy to dilute the Arabs of Khuzestan by displacing
them and encouraging others to settle there. The letter, which
authorities said was forged, ignited protests that were put down by
force, leaving at least 31 dead, according to rights group Amnesty
International.
As the anniversary of that crackdown approached in 2011, Ahwazi
activists began calling for a "Day of Rage" in the spirit of popular
anti-government revolts in Egypt and Tunisia.
Protests broke out but were quelled by authorities who have since
rounded up dozens of Ahwazi activists, at least five of whom are
currently awaiting execution on terrorism-related charges, rights groups
say.
Ahwazi groups are divided over whether to seek independence or devolution of power within a democratic, federal Iran.
"We have a right to seek independence, but is that possible at this
time? I don't think so," said Abu Khaled, a member of the biggest Ahwazi
federalist party, speaking in Dubai.
"We have to be pragmatists, or else we will be a part of history, like the Red Indians (Native Americans)".
(Editing by Peter Graff)
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