Via Matt, from the Telegraph:
America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear programme……In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials.
Such incidents have been carried out by the Kurds in the west, the Azeris in the north-west, the Ahwazi Arabs in the south-west, and the Baluchis in the south-east. Non-Persians make up nearly 40 per cent of Iran's 69 million population, with around 16 million Azeris, seven million Kurds, five million Ahwazis and one million Baluchis. Most Baluchis live over the border in Pakistan….
…Such a policy is fraught with risk, however. Many of the groups share little common cause with Washington other than their opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose regime they accuse of stepping up repression of minority rights and culture.
I’ve argued before that this is the third pillar of the regime change strategy, along with bombing and sanctions. As per the Telegraph’s caveats, the idea of a federated Iran is already the policy of Iranian Kurdish and Ahwazi Arab groups, and there seems to be an effort underway to extend the notion to accommodate their more religiously inclined counterparts in Iranian Balochistan. It’s a lovely, cuddly Iraq of the nations we’re talking here, forged by a process of ethnic warfare.
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