Israel Matzav: There's an insurrection in Iran

Monday, April 18, 2011

There's an insurrection in Iran

Things are apparently heating up again in Iran, although the Obama administration is once again choosing to ignore it. Michael Ledeen has details.

–Iranian Arabs in the Ahwaz oil region have risen up, first on Friday’s “Day of Rage” in which at least nine protesters were killed by the regime’s security forces, and then again on Saturday, about which there are only very early reports as I write on Saturday afternoon. The regime doesn’t want the world to know about these protests, both because it suggests the vulnerability of the country’s major source of income, and because it shows once again that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have failed to impose their will on a population that wants an end to the regime itself. Thus foreign “observers” have been forbidden to travel to Ahwaz, and the disinformation mavens in Tehran staged their own “demonstrations,” claiming that the population was protesting the treatment of Shi’ites in Bahrain. Nobody was fooled, least of all the (mostly Sunni) Ahwaz Arabs.

–The systematic sabotage of the petrochemical industry and the nation’s vital pipelines — to which I have so often referred — continues apace. On March 15th, the Azerbaijan Movement for Democracy and Integrity in Iran claimed credit for the fiery conflagration of the big Tabriz refinery. The facility was totally shut down for three days, and more than 100 fire-fighting vehicles took 11 hours to get the blaze under control. The government declared a state of emergency and the security forces sealed off the area in a massive manhunt. But no arrests were made.

–Strikes, of varying duration, in the oil sector, ranging from the big petrochemical plant at Bandar Imam to the Abadan refinery and oil fields.

–The relentless destruction of the country’s gas pipelines, which run from the southern refineries to the Turkish border. Three major pipelines come together south of Tehran, just outside the holy city of Qom, and they were all blown up on February 11th. After they were patched up, there was another blast on April 8th, which was branded a “terrorist attack” (nobody was prepared to believe the fairy tale about yet another accidental explosion, even though the regime’s capacity for failure and self-destruction is incomparable in the modern world).

A few humorists in the Parliament suggested that the regime might devote some attention to security.

–In case you were wondering, not everyone in the opposition subscribes to Ghandian non-violence, even though the two main figures in the Greeen Movement — Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi — have always insisted on it. Some Kurdish groups seem unconvinced, and in recent weeks more than a dozen Revolutionary Guards have been killed by gunfire in Kurdistan. Kurdish casualties are less than half; the Ahwazis have been shooting back as well, but it’s hard to get casualty figures. Just today, a big bomb went off in a central square in Sanandaz, apparently aimed at the Guards.