Article contains some background on "The Army of Justice" Sunni militant group in Iran.The latest series of attacks by JA have not been isolated incidents. The armed Sunni group has carried out several military operations against the Iranian forces since 2012. The latest was on December 5, when four members of JA were killed by Iranian security guards in a series of skirmishes along the border between Iran and Pakistan (JamNews [Tehran], December 5). The militant group warns of future attacks against Iranian officials, while the Iranian state calls for a firmer response to such attacks.
JA describes itself as a "political-military" movement of the "Ahle Sunnat-e Iran" (Sunnis of Iran), with the aspiration of freeing the Baluch people from the hegemony of the Iranian government. The leader of the group, Abdul Rahim Mollahzadeh (a.k.a. Salah al-din Farogi), comes from Rasak, a southeastern border town in the impoverished Sarbaz County wiwhose local population has close cultural connections with the Pakistani region of Baluchistan (Shafaf, November 12).
The movement maintains that it is a clandestine group that focuses on attacking military bases and deliberately avoids harming civilians in order to uphold a just war against the "Safavi" regime in Iran. The reference is to the Safavid Empire, which established Shia Islam as the state religion in sixteenth-century Iran.
The origin of the JA goes back to 2012, when the organization first emerged as an offshoot of Jundallah (Soldiers of God), a Sunni militant organization of Baluch ethnic background founded by Abdolmalek Rigi, who was executed by the Islamic Republic in 2010 (al-Arabiya, October 29; JameJam News, October 29; Shafaf, November 12). While Jundallah disintegrated with the death of Rigi, JA emerged as a new Baluch militant movement with strong sectarian ideological overtones. Unlike Jundallah, whose primary demand was that Tehran improve the lives of Iranian Sunnis, JA appears to be more of a separatist movement, demanding that the Iranian regime leave the Sistan-Baluchistan province.
In terms of organization, JA appears to be a tightly knit group of Sunni Baluch fighters who may have both rural and urban support in the Iranian and Pakistani border region. The group is based in three military camps near the Iranian-Pakistani border (JamNews December 2013). In operational terms, the group engages in activities such as the use of explosives against Iranian border guards, hostage-taking operations and assassination attacks against high-ranking government officials in the province.
The group has employed social media as a way to propagate its ideology and to express demands on the Iranian state. Videos and clips of military operations are posted online sporadically, often days or weeks after a military conflict between the organization and the Iranian military forces took place. JA leader Salah al-din Farogi and other commanders post anti-government statements on Facebook and YouTube, speaking of the oppressive nature of the Iranian regime and its efforts to marginalize Baluch, Arab and Kurdish populations. The videotaped confessions of prisoners purported to be Iranian intelligence officers are also posted on the group's Facebook and blog sites.
According to the Iranian state, JA is a foreign-backed militia that is modeled after the militant-political organization Sazman-e Mojahedin-e Khalq-e Iran (People's Mujahideen of Iran), a dissident-militant group known for its terrorist operations before and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution (Mashreq News, October 27). Tehran accuses JA of taking support from Israel and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, which seek to destabilize the unity of Islamic Iran (ShiaNews, November 18).
In reality, JA is a political-military movement that reflects a recent wave of radicalization among the younger Baluch population. The trend towards militancy and sectarianism is largely due to a combination of domestic and regional grievances. Such grievances play an integral part in shaping the conditions upon which the JA has risen to challenge the Iranian state, though its success in legitimizing its operations among the local population remains unknown.