The ISIS* terrorist group may be on the wane in Iraq and Syria but for Iran, the threat is still strong, centered on Kurdish communities along the Iraq-Iran border where militants have operated in recent years. As Asharq Al-Awsat writes in the article ISIS Threatens Iran from ‘Kurdish Tora Bora’ Region, the locals even have a nickname for the area, “Tora Bora”, after the mountain hideout al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden fled to after the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, a senior Iraqi security official in the border region said according to a Reuters report on Monday.
In late January, three Revolutionary Guards were killed in the Bamo region fighting 21 ISIS terrorists who had sneaked in from Iraq. Three militants detonated suicide vests and two others were killed in the clash, the Guards said. Days earlier, Iran’s intelligence ministry found a weapons cache in the town of Marivan on the Iranian side of the border that included TNT, C4, electronic detonators, grenades, ammunition clips for AK-47 machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. The clash and discovery indicate that ISIS still has the ability to penetrate the tightly controlled security net of Iran. “Today (ISIS*) does not control a country ... in order to assert that they exist, they may carry out an attack any day,” Hossein Dehghan, a former defense minister and now an adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said in a recent interview with the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
Many of the Iranian and Iraqi Kurds now fighting with ISIS* are part of a second generation of extremists largely influenced by Zarqawi’s deadly legacy, Iraqi security officials and Peshmerga commanders familiar with the matter say. Hamai Hama Seid, a senior Peshmerga commander and member of the Iraqi Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party, said Kurdish ISIS members take advantage of their knowledge of the language and region as well as strong cross-border ties. “There are definitely ties between the Iranian and Iraqi extremists on the two sides of the border,” Seid told Reuters in the Iraqi border village of Tawila, only a few hundred meters from the Iranian border. He added: “The extremists exploited this area because it’s mountainous, difficult and wooded.”
Many of the young men are poorly educated and have few economic opportunities, allowing extremist recruiters to flourish, Iraqi security officials and Peshmerga commanders say.
Iranian authorities say the arms cache found on the border was going to be used to attack civilians in public areas, a follow-up to the shocking assault on the parliament in Tehran and the mausoleum of the founder of Iran’s revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini, last June that left at least 18 people dead and dozens wounded. ISIS* claimed responsibility for that assault and threatened more. The Revolutionary Guards responded by raining missiles on the militants in Syria and arresting dozens of suspects in Iran.
The June attack was conceived by an Iraqi militant using the nom de guerre Abu Aisha, a senior commander in a unit of ISIS* fighting in Iraq and Syria made up exclusively of Kurds, according to the Iranian ministry of intelligence. The Tehran attackers fought in Mosul and Raqqa and trained outside Iran, the ministry said.
In the fall of 2016, a number of Kurdish ISIS* militants led by Abu Aisha came to an Iraqi border village near Halabja to try to establish a base of operations which could carry out attacks in both Iran and Iraq, according to Iraqi security officials familiar with the matter.
Peshmerga killed Abu Aisha in December 2016. Afterward, Serias Sadeghi, who ran a bakery with his brother in Paveh, an Iranian town about 15 km (9 miles) from the border, took over as lead planner for the Tehran attacks. Sadeghi knew Abu Aisha and had crossed back and forth into Iraq with him multiple times. During the attack on Khomeini’s mausoleum, Sadeghi detonated a suicide vest, shooting up an orange fireball captured on amateur video. The other four attackers were also killed.
The Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), an Iranian opposition group fighting for greater autonomy for the Kurdish community, posted a report online in 2014 about extremists spreading propaganda for ISIS and trying to recruit young men for the group in Iran. They named Sadeghi as an individual actively recruiting in Paveh. “They were in most of the mosques in Kurdistan and spread propaganda but none of them were arrested by Iran,” said Mohammad Saleh Ghaderi, a representative of the PDKI in Erbil.
Attempts to reach representatives from the Iranian Ministry of Interior were not successful. But documents show Iranian authorities were aware of the growing threat. A report issued by Iran’s Ministry of Interior noted in 2014: “Many Salafist Iranian Kurds have announced the readiness to join ISIS in Iraq and many have traveled to Syria.
*ISIS is a terrorist organization banned in Russia
