14 Iran security personnel seized on Pakistan border

Fourteen Iranian security personnel, including Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers, were abducted on the volatile southeastern border with Pakistan on Tuesday, state media reported.

The border guards were "abducted between 4 am and 5 am in the Lulakdan area of the border by a terrorist group," the official IRNA news agency said.

Lulakdan is a small village 150 kilometres (about 90 miles) southeast of Zahedan, capital of the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan.

The 14 were involved in "a security operation" and included two members of the elite Revolutionary Guards intelligence unit, seven Basij militiamen and five regular border guards, the Young Journalists' Club (YJC), a state-owned news website, said.

The report was deleted from the YJC website shortly afterwards.

The province has long been a flashpoint, with Baluchi separatists and jihadists based in Pakistan regularly attacking Iranian security posts.

On September 28, the Guards said they had killed four militants who had slipped across the border.

Sistan-Baluchistan has a large, mainly Sunni Muslim ethnic Baluchi community which straddles the border.

Sunni extremist group Jundallah (Soldiers of God) launched a bloody insurgency in the province in 2000 targeting the security forces and officials of Iran's Shiite-dominated government.

The campaign peaked with a spate of deadly attacks from 2007 -- including twin suicide bombings against a Shiite mosque that killed 28 people -- but abated after the group's leader was killed in mid-2010.

In 2012, Jundullah members formed a successor organisation called Jaish al-Adl (Army of Justice), which has carried out a spate of attacks on the security forces.

Iran has alleged that the group has received support from the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, with the complicity of Pakistan.

Related Links
News From Across The Stans

Tweet

Thanks for being there;
We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain.

With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords.

Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year.

If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.

SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter
$5+ Billed Monthly

paypal only

SpaceDaily Contributor
$5 Billed Once

credit card or paypal

China rolls out PR push on Muslim internments
Beijing (AFP) Oct 16, 2018
China on Tuesday issued an ardent defence of the alleged mass internment of minorities in its far west Xinjiang region, with a regional official insisting that authorities are preventing terrorism through "vocational education" centres. Beijing has sought to counter a global outcry against the facilities with a series of op-eds and interviews and a roll out of new regulations that retroactively codify the use of a system of extra-judicial "reeducation" camps in Xinjiang. Up to one million ethnic ... read more