Baluchi militants on Jan. 6 carried out an armed operation against Iranian security forces on the outskirts of the city of Sarbaz in Baluchistan province, claiming dozens of casualties, including senior Revolutionary Guards officers. The Jaish al-Adl (Army of Justice) group said the operation was carried out by its Abdulmalik Mollazadeh Brigade. A press release said their forces ambushed two military vehicles carrying a large number of Revolutionary Guards personnel in the Jekigvar area, with the drivers and nearly all passengers killed or injured. A terse report from the regime’s official Fars News Agency acknowledged only that one border guard had been killed and others wounded in an ambush by "terrorists."

The operation came three days after Arab resistance fighters in the Ahwaz region of Iran (Khuzestan in Farsi) blew up two oil pipelines and warned that more such operations are planned—just as Iran signed 29 major contracts with international oil and gas companies, including France's Total, Russia's Gazprom and Lukoil, and Schlumberger of the Netherlands.

In a statement to Ahwazna, news service of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA), Jaish Al-Adl representative Ibrahim Azizi said that the Baluchistan operation took place "in the context of our mutual struggle founded in co-operation that has grown stronger in recent years, which aims to create a practical and political alliance to end the [Iranian regime’s] injustice and oppression against our peoples and to address its terrorism against the people of Iran and against Arabs and Muslims generally."

Azizi added that the operation is considered a legitimate response to the daily crimes of the Iranian regime's military and security forces against the Baluchi people, who are engaged in a struggle to realize their civil, political and legal rights.

Contributed by Rahim Hamid and Ruth Riegler for CounterVortex