TEHRAN, 26 November 2004 — The head of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards yesterday accused the United States of financing rebel groups fighting the Islamic regime and seeking to spark ethnic unrest along its borders, the state news agency IRNA reported.
“With its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is seeking to plot and create insecurity inside Iran and wants to encourage ethnic problems in our country,” Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi was quoted as telling a gathering of the Revolutionary Guard’s volunteer wing, the Basij militia.
“In Iraq, the Americans have taken the hypocrites under their wings,” he said, referring to the exiled armed opposition group the People’s Mujahedeen - now confined to camps in neighboring Iraq and listed by the US and European Union as a terrorist group.
He alleged that the United States was also supporting “counter-revolutionary groups” including the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran and the Komala, a Kurdish-Maoist group.
The two groups have bases in neighboring Iraq, but Iran and Iraqi Kurdish groups are believed to have reached an accord that the Iranian Kurdish groups keep away from the Iranian border.
But the United States, Safavi said, “is giving them money to create insecurity in Iran.”
And he claimed that “in Afghanistan, the Americans have brought together Iranian rebels to create insecurity in Sistan-Baluchestan,” Iran’s far southeastern province and home to a large ethnic Baluch minority. “But the Americans should know that they will carry all hope of dominating Iran and causing insecurity in Iran to their graves,” Safavi told the gathering.
