We think so frequently of Iran’s worrisome threats to many of its neighbors, whether to Israel through its nuclear program or to Sunni Arab states through its relentless push to create a Shi’a crescent from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, using a network of proxies and allies, including the Houthis in Yemen, the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia in Iraq, the Alawite-controlled army of Bashar Assad in Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, that we sometimes forget how threatened the Iranian state is from within.
Part of the threat to Iran’s regime comes from a population increasingly disaffected because of the mismanagement and corruption of the government. Protesters raging against the money sent to support adventures abroad chant “Death to Palestine,” “Help us, not Gaza,” and “Leave Syria alone and deal with Iran.” Money sent abroad to support foreign allies now enrages Iranians, ever more so as the sanctions reimposed by the Trump Administration have sent the economy into free fall, with the revenues from oil sales down by 96%, and the rial having lost more than 90% of its value in just two years. Sixty million Iranians, out of a total population of 83 million, are now living below the poverty line. The unhinged cruelty of the regime, desperate to assert itself against any sign of dissidence, was recently demonstrated by the execution of two of its wrestling champions on trumped-up charges.
But along with all this economic misery leading to political disaffection, there is another internal weakness that must worry the rulers in Tehran. It threatens not only the regime, but the very existence of the country. It is the result of the ethnic divisions within Iran that constantly challenge the rule of the majority Persians. For fewer than half of the Iranian population consists of Persians; there are also Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds, and Arabs, all of whom harbor separatist hopes. This was brought home recently by the hanging of a Baluch separatist. The report on his execution is here: “Iran hangs Baloch militant for killing of two Revolutionary Guards,” Reuters, January 30, 2021:
Iran executed on Saturday an ethnic Baloch militant convicted of killing Revolutionary Guards members, the judiciary’s official website reported, a day after the United Nations urged Iranian authorities to spare his life.
The Mizan site said Javid Dehghan, who it said was a leader of the Sunni militant group Jaish al-Adl, or the Army of Justice, was hanged for shooting dead two Guards five years ago in the southeastern Sistan-Balochistan province….
Jaish al-Adl, which says it seeks greater rights and better living conditions for ethnic minority Balochis, has claimed responsibility for several attacks in recent years on Iranian security forces in the province.
There is a Baloch separatist movement in both Iran and Pakistan, fighting to create an independent Balochistan, carved out of both countries. While Jaish al-Adl says it merely wants to improve living conditions and greater rights for the Baloch people, this is in order, for now, to deliberately downplay its ultimate aim, which is an independent Balochistan. The authorities in Tehran know this perfectly well.
For the biggest threat to the Islamic Republic’s existence lies within its borders, and not from foreign enemies. Only 50% of Iran’s population consists of Persians.
There are four main ethnic groups, in addition to the Persians in Iran: the Azeris, the Kurds, the Arabs, and the Balochis. Each is a threat to Iran’s continuance as a state within its present borders.
After World War I, the Kurds were promised by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) a large degree of autonomy, with the promise of future independence. But Ataturk managed to undo that promise in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and the Kurds — who number about 45 million people — were instead split among Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran.
There are about ten million Kurds in Iran, more than 10% of the population. Iran must worry that any success by Kurds in Syria, Iraq, or Turkey to achieve greater autonomy will only encourage Kurdish separatists in Iran. A few years ago it seemed that the Kurds in Iraq, having enjoyed autonomy under American protection during the last years of Saddam Hussein’s reign (when American air cover prevented Saddam’s air force from bombing the Kurds), and during the first years after his overthrow, might be moving toward independence, but the regime in Baghdad has so far managed to keep the Kurds from leaving the state. And right now Erdogan’s military has been suppressing Kurds with military force both in Syria and in northern Iraq; this has discouraged the Kurdish separatists in Iran. But their failure to obtain greater autonomy in Iran, much less independence, has not reconciled the Iranian Kurds to their situation. They are waiting for a more opportune time. Their threat to the Iranian state remains. And the rulers in Tehran remember with dread the last violent uprisings by Iranian Kurds, in 1979, which were ferociously crushed, with at least 30,000 Kurds killed. Iran has to keep troops in the Kurdish areas, and must continually worry about the condition of Kurds elsewhere, and the possible threat of peshmerga volunteers from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, who might make their way to help their Kurdish brothers in Iran.
There are 20 million Azeris in Iran, or about 23% of the population. There are, in fact, twice as many Azeris in Iran than in Azerbaijan itself. They, too, would like independence from their Persian masters, so that they might join an enlarged state of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s recent military victory over Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh has been a source of encouragement for the Azeris in Iran wishing to join Azerbaijan. If they rose in rebellion, they would be hard to suppress, given their numbers, especially if they could call on Azerbaijan, just next store, to supply them with weapons and fighters.
The Azeris in Iran have not been well treated. The Iranian government has banned the teaching of the Azeri language and literature in Iranian schools. When, in 2015, the Iranians broadcast programs that mocked the Azeri accent and language, this alone led Azeris, already on the edge, to demonstrate in many cities, shouting such slogans as “stop racism against Azeri Turks,” “long live Azerbaijan,” and “end the Persian racism,” in Tabriz, Urmia, Ardabil, and Zanjan, and even Tehran itself. Civil unrest among the Azeris is a given. And independent, newly victorious Azerbaijan, full of Azeri fighters, is just on the other side of the porous border with Iran.
The Baluch people in the east of Iran, bordering the Province of Baluchistan in Pakistan, are Sunni, and have suffered terrible discrimination in Shi’a-ruled Iran. Only 2,000 of the 3.3 million college students currently in Iran, for example, are Baluchis. On the other hand, Baluchis make up 55% of those who have been executed in recent years by the Islamic Republic. The Iranian regime has forbidden the exclusive use of the Baluchi language in writing — that means any Baluchi text must always include a Farsi translation. It’s a way to keep track of what the Baluchis are saying to one another, a part of intelligence gathering. In 2002 Baluchis founded the Jundullah, a religious and political organisation that has claimed rights for the Baluchis in eastern Iran. It has carried out both attacks on the Iranian military, and suicide bombings of Shi’a mosques. It is also suspected of kidnapping an Iranian nuclear scientist. Like the Kurds and the Azeris, the nearly two million Baluchis can count on aid, including men, money, and materiel, coming from the other side of a porous Iranian border, offered by the 9 million Baluchis in Pakistan, who are keenly aware of the mistreatment of their fellow Baluchis by the Shi’a government in Iran.
The final minority that has been mistreated by the Persians are the Arabs in Khuzestan, the oil-producing southern province on the Gulf that was devastated in the Iran-Iraq war, with much of the area left in ruins. The Iranians claim there are only two million of them; the Arabs claim there are five million Arabs in Khuzestan. Whatever their number, the Khuzestanian Arabs have long complained of discrimination by the Persians. In 2005, there were mass riots and mass arrests of 25,000 people in Khuzestan, and many Arabs were summarily executed. Arrests, torture, and executions have continued to imperfectly keep the peace. There were more riots in 2007, followed by more repression; in 2015, there were a wave of arrests made so as to head off any tenth-anniversary revolt; the rage remains. But if those Khuzestanian Arabs were supplied directly with arms, and with the money to buy additional arms and to pay Arab fighters from outside, they could cause a great deal of destruction to the oilfields and thus to the Iranian economy. Given that Iran has sent arms to the Houthis in order to establish an Iran-backed Yemen that would serve as a base for anti-Saudi activities (including whipping up the Shi’a in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province), why should not the Saudis, and other Arabs, do likewise, and supply the Khuzestanian Arabs with weapons and “volunteers” to fight their Persian masters?
Were Iran to lose control of Khuzestan, it would also be losing the region from which 85% of its oil, and 60% of its gas, is produced. In other words, the loss of Khuzestan would likely destroy the Iranian economy. And even if the territory were not lost to separatists, if the Arabs of Khuzestan rose in revolt, armed with weapons bought or supplied by Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich Gulf Arab states, the destruction unavoidably wrought on the oilfields and pipelines, either by the Arabs in revolt, or by the Iranians fighting those Arabs, could put much of Iran’s oil production out of commission for years. The prospect of this is no doubt causing nightmares in Tehran. From the viewpoint of the Arab members of OPEC, there’s an added bonus to a heavily-armed insurrection in Khuzestan, which is that even when the American sanctions are lifted– which kept sales of Iranian oil low — Iranian oil production will still stay way down as a result both of deliberate sabotage by Arab separatists to the oilfields and pipelines, and from interruptions in the flow that would be the result of armed conflict between Iran’s army and the Khuzestanian separatists. So even if American sanctions are lifted, and Iran can again export oil, its possession and production of that oil remains under a constant threat from the Arabs of Khuzestan.
The Iranian nightmare is not limited to what the Great Satan, America, or the Little Satan, Israel, might do to the country in order to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weapons. It is also an internal nightmare: what might become of the country if any one, or two, or three, of its four discontented minorities – the Azeris, the Kurds, the Balochis, the Arabs – were to successfully throw off the Persian yoke? Still more nightmarish is the prospect of all four groups rising in separatist rebellion at the same time. Could they possibly coordinate their uprisings? Wouldn’t it make perfect sense for them to do so, so that the Iranian arm would be spread thin? With the Azeris likely to receive aid from Azerbaijan’s fighters next door, with the Kurds receiving weapons and peshmerga volunteers from Iraq and Syria, with the Balochis getting armed fighters from the nine million Balochis just across Iran’s border with Pakistan, with the Arabs of Khuzestan receiving weapons and volunteers from Sunni Arabs in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, how long could the Islamic Republic of Iran continue to exist as a single state? Iran has had trouble with its conventional centrifuges before. We all remember Stuxnet. How well could Iran withstand these ethnic centrifugal forces, spinning out of its control?
John says
English lesson. ‘..just next door.’
Infidel says
The interesting thing about Azerbaijan is that they have claims on the Azeri province of Iran by the same name. While the Azeris are racially Turkic, they’re also shi’a, and a pretty integral part of Iran’s shi’a history: the Safavids, who converted Iran from a sunni to a shi’a country originated there. Iran losing Azerbaijan would be lethal to their national identity – it’s like having a founder of one nation being based in another. It also explains why Iran had supported Armenia against Azerbaijan over the decades, and only became more neutral due to their improved relationship w/ Turkey. Which of course could be undone if Azerbaijan and Turkey were to agree to try and seize Tabriz
The improved relationship w/ Turkey is probably due to the opposition both countries have from, and to, primarily the Arabs and secondarily the Kurds. Turkey is trying to do what Iran theologically can’t do, since Turkey is sunni and not shi’a: claim leadership of the ummah. In that exercise, they’ve managed to poach the likes of Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and other previously pro-Iran sunni organizations, and shift the focus of leadership towards Ankara. As a result, Turkey’s crackdown on Kurds in 3 of the 4 countries is encouraging to Iran, particularly after the US withdrawal
The Khuzestan part of Iran has been fascinating in that the Arabs, who are mainly shi’a like their comrades in Basra, Karbala and Najaf, have been uninterested in either their Iraqi neighbors or their religious comrades in Hizbullah or Yemen. I doubt that Saudi Arabia or Emirates would wanna support shi’a Arabs against Tehran: they’ve not yet fully reconciled to Baghdad having a government where shi’a have a voice. Iraq, otoh, might, especially if it perceives continued Iranian interference. Iran’s Azerbaijan could just come under Baku, and nothing would change internationally other than newly recognized borders. Similarly, Khuzestan could become a part of Iraq, and the same thing would happen. Which is one reason both Iraq and Azerbaijan are wary of Iran
Balochistan is an issue that could, if it hasn’t already, bring Islamabad and Teheran together. Both countries have Baloch separatist movements, as Hugh noted, and in Pakistan, it’s driven by Chicom exploitation of Balochi resources under the Belt/Road
scamsprograms and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is now a pet project of Pakistan’s generals who have been given a carte blanche from Imran Khan, who’s an economic illiterate despite Economics being one of the subjects he graduated in. (Hope this run-on sentence is worthy of Hugh ?) On top of that, Pakistan’s relationship w/ Gulf countries is at rock bottom, since Pakistan had been pestering them on supporting them on Kashmir, whereas the Gulf countries, having seen their oil markets crash, don’t wanna lose India as an economic partner. Result of that is that Pakistan is freer to move closer to Iran, and ever since the Saudis cut off the spigot of free oil, Pakistan has been secretly smuggling in Iranian oil via Juzzak, near their border w/ IranIf a concerted attempt were to be made to dismember Iran, it would be worth the popcorn. On one hand, Pakistan is now a very close ally of Azerbaijan and Turkey, and enthusiastically supported them against Armenia. Otoh, both countries are opposed to an independent Balochistan and are more likely to find common cause there. Similarly, since they’ve soured on the Arabs, Pakistan is unlikely to prefer an independent Khuzestan. On top of all that, the Chabahar project, which Iran originally was trying to plan w/ India, has been awarded to China due to Indian companies unwilling to incur US sanctions, and so the only reason Pakistan had to be suspicious of Iran is now gone. Both countries, along w/ Turkey and Azerbaijan, are likely to be held together by Beijing. It’ll be fascinating to see an Iranian implosion that sucks in all its neighbors – Turkey, Azerbaijan, the Kurds, Iraq, Pakistan and possibly even Afghanistan
Walter Sieruk says
“The Islamic republic of Iran exists and operates as what every fundamentalist dreams of, an Islamic state ruled by Sharia law …” [1]
It’s complete blindness , delusion ,folly and error to even attempt to establish Sharia law in North Africa or for that matter any other nation or place in this world.
About Islamic law ,otherwise known and Sharia law. It should be made known that the actual origin of Sharia law is revealed in a Time –Life book with the title MESOPOTAMIA: THE MIGHTY KINGS copyright 1995. The point is this history book about the ancient pagan world of Mesopotamia informs the reader that “many Islamic laws resemble the Babylon and Assyrian forebears.” .page 150.
There is the above and other references imply that such pagan teachings were incorporated into the religion that Muhammad manufactured and then started.
Thus this further reveals that a lot of ancient paganism is part of the whole religion of Islam.
In other words, ancient paganism makes up much of Islam. Therefore Islam is a hoax.
[1] THE ISLAM IN ISLAMIC TERRORISM by Ibn Warraq page 347
Charlie in NY says
One of the great ironies of believing antisemitic tropes is that the West deluded itself that the Jews did in fact have tremendous power in Russia and the US (notwithstanding all the objective evidence showing otherwise). Had these leaders been less prejudiced, they would have seen that in reality the Jewish people had very little if any political influence to bring to bear on the decisions made in WWI. It would then have followed that the Jews, like the Kurds and the region’s other indigenous ethnicities, would have been abandoned to the tender mercies of their reinstalled Arab imperial overlords.
As it was, the Jews barely hung-on as the UK, in its capacity of Mandatory power, attempted to renege on its “sacred trust” and turn over the Mandate land to majority Arab rule – as was set out explicitly in its 1939 White Paper. The real tragedy is that had the UK instead honored its obligations, then as history unrolled a large number of European Jews would have survived the Shoah, settled in their ancestral homeland and create such a large majority of the residents in the Mandate territory that today’s Israel would indeed stretch through that entire territory with the Arabs of Palestine a small minority with equal rights (as envisaged by the Mandate and Zionist theory). One can only look back on the as a missed opportunity – and tragedy – of historical proportions, and ascribe it in part to the combination of the British tendency to romanticize the Arabs and a resurgence of traditional British antisemitic thought.
In a time of national self-determination, the post-WWI territorial settlements would have been the perfect time for the indigenous peoples to be granted these rights. Unfortunately, the concept of “self-determination” itself was essentially limited to Europeans (which not coincidentally served the purpose of the UK and France in effectively weakening their primary German and Austro-Hungarian enemies by dismantling their empires while their acquiescence to the Turks would ensure that it remained a barrier to Russian adventurism in the Middle East). Everything and everyone else fell under the old rubric of raison d’état. And so here we are today still dealing with the consequences.
Cornelius says
People have been predicting the fall of the regime since its inception….and it never seems to happen. Of all the episodes of unrest, the events of 2009 came the closest. But if recent history has taught us anything, it’s that with foreign help, even the most hated, despotic regimes can survive. To name two examples, we have Maduro in Venezuela and Assad in Syria. Neither has any tangible public support from within their respective countries….but both survive with the critical help of friends abroad.
Shia Iran has a history of making common cause with the infidels against her Sunni neighbors…e.g., Persia’s alliance with the British against the Ottomans. It makes perfect geo-political sense. If the mullah’s are ever overthrown, Iran will become a staunch ally of the West. But that’s a big if. The regime is entrenched….and even if it starts to unravel, like Maduro and Assad, the ayatollahs have Russia and China to shore them up.
Keith O says
Can someone correct me if I’m wrong. I thought the dictatorship in Iran was made up of Arabs not Persians.
Is this correct?
gravenimage says
No, they’re Persian, Keith. Many in the region claim descent from Muhammed, but this is mostly absurd Islamic posturing.
Khamenei was born in Iraq, but his background is Persian on both sides of the family.
Keith O says
Thanks GI, But I’m curious, “both sides of the family”? Their family tree should be a straight line!
gravenimage says
Keith, I just meant on his mother and father’s side of the family. I haven’t traced it back any further than that. But yes–so many Muslims are the product of cousin marriages.
Quazgaa says
And Khomeini’s father was allegedly a British officer stationed in India..
Of course, any iranian muslim will tell you otherwise, but don’t you dare calling an iranian arab lest you want to insult them.
gravenimage says
I hadn’t heard that one before.
gravenimage says
In Iran, Centrifuges — And Centrifugal Forces
……………….
Well, I hope so–but we’ve been told that the Mullocracy is tottering and not long for the world over the past forty years now…