Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence claimed on Wednesday that its operatives prevented “mercenaries for the American-Zionist enemy” from invading the southern province of Sistan and Baluchestan, thwarting a plot to “destabilize the province and strike at economic infrastructure in the south.”
The invasion was apparently rather small, as the Ministry of Intelligence claimed only four people were arrested, and two more killed, in the course of dismantling two cells of a “Takfiri terrorist group.”
“Takfiri” essentially means “fake Muslim” or “apostate.” The term is often used by Muslim powers to denigrate their political adversaries.
Ebrahim Azizi, chair of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, claimed on Wednesday that the modest security action in Sistan and Baluchestan stopped a “planned ground offensive against Iran.”
Azizi said that if any further offensives are attempted, Iran would target Americans “wherever they are in the world.” He vowed to continue pressing the U.S. “until its final defeat.”
Sistan and Baluchestan is one of the largest and most restless provinces in Iran. The regime knew it was likely to have trouble with the impoverished and oppressed Baloch people, a Sunni Muslim ethnic and religious minority, so Tehran launched a brutal crackdown on dissent as soon as the June ceasefire agreement with the United States gave Iran some breathing room.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which handles the oppression of the Iranian people to keep the regime in power, claims it has dismantled several armed terrorist cells in Sistan and Baluchestan over the past few months — supposedly ambushing them just as they were about to conduct violent operations.
Armed insurgent activity in Sistan and Baluchestan is not improbable and, if the U.S. military was thinking about a ground operation against Iran, it could certainly choose worse places to begin. The province is bordered by the Gulf of Oman in the south, and boasts Iran’s only major deep-water port, Chabahar.
The U.S. bombed the area around Chabahar in mid-July, disrupting what U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) described as a “maritime surveillance network along Iran’s Gulf of Oman coastline, used for decades by the IRGC to track and target commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.”
The U.S. chose not to inflict heavy damage on the port, possibly because it was jointly developed by Iran and India, which wants to route cargo through Chabahar in order to bypass its rival Pakistan.