Comment by Riaz Haq on July 25, 2020 at 6:58pm

#Bangladesh PM refusing to meet #Indian envoy to #Dhaka despite repeated requests over 2 months. Hasina has ordered slow-down of all #India funded project while #Chinese funded projects are fast-tracked in BD. #Modi's #Hindutva rhetoric is affecting ties.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/sheikh-hasina-failed-to-meet...

All Indian projects in Bangladesh have slowed down since the re-election of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2019.
A prominent newspaper of Bangladesh has said Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina did not meet India’s High Commissioner despite repeated requests for a meeting in the last four months.
Bhorer Kagoj, a prominent daily, has reported that all Indian projects have slowed down since the re-election of Prime Minister Hasina in 2019 with Chinese infrastructure projects receiving more support from Dhaka.
“Despite India's concern, Bangladesh has given the contract of building an airport terminal in Sylhet to a Chinese company. Indian High Commissioner Riva Ganguly Das tried for four months to get an appointment with the Prime Minister of Bangladesh but did not get it. Bangladesh has not even sent a note of appreciation to India in response to Indian assistance for the COVID-19 pandemic”, said the newspaper's editor Shyamal Dutta in an article on the recent tilt of Dhaka towards Pakistan and China.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 26, 2020 at 9:28am

#UN says thousands of anti-Pakistan militants in #Afghanistan. #Pakistan being attacked by #terrorists, particularly linked to the #TTP or Jamaat-ul-Ahrar or Lashkar-e-Islam, as well as those with the Baluchistan Liberation Army (#BLA). https://news.yahoo.com/un-says-thousands-anti-pakistan-102605170.ht... via @YahooNews

A U.N. report says more than 6,000 Pakistani insurgents are hiding in Afghanistan, most belonging to the outlawed Pakistani Taliban group responsible for attacking Pakistani military and civilian targets.

The report released this week said the group, known as the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP), has linked up with the Afghan-based affiliate of the Islamic State group. Some of TTP's members have even joined the IS affiliate, which has its headquarters in eastern Afghanistan.

The Afghan government did not respond Sunday to requests by The Associated Press for comment.

The report said IS in Afghanistan, known as IS in Khorasan province, has been hit hard by Afghan security forces as well as U.S. and NATO forces, and even on occasion by the Afghan Taliban. The report was prepared by the U.N. analytical and sanctions monitoring team, which tracks terrorist groups around the world.

The report estimated the membership of IS in Afghanistan at 2,200, and while its leadership has been depleted, IS still counts among its leaders a Syrian national Abu Said Mohammad al-Khorasani. The report also said the monitoring team had received information that two senior Islamic State commanders, Abu Qutaibah and Abu Hajar al-Iraqi, had recently arrived in Afghanistan from the Middle East.

“Although in territorial retreat, (the Islamic State) remains capable of carrying out high-profile attacks in various parts of the country, including Kabul. It also aims to attract Taliban fighters who oppose the agreement with the United States,” the report said, referring to a U.S. peace deal signed with the Taliban in February.

That deal was struck to allow the U.S. to end its 19-year involvement in Afghanistan, and calls on the Taliban to guarantee its territory will not be used by terrorist groups. The deal is also expected to guarantee the Taliban's all-out participation in the fight against IS.

The second and perhaps most critical part of the agreement calls for talks between the Taliban and Kabul's political leadership.

Late Saturday, the U.S. State Department issued a statement saying its peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad was again shuttling through the region seeking to jump start those negotiations, which have been repeatedly postponed as both sides squabble over a prisoner release program.

The U.S.-backed deal calls for the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners and the Taliban to free 1,000 government and military personnel as a so-called good will gesture ahead of talks. Until now the government is refusing to release nearly 600 Taliban prisoners it calls high-profile criminals and has offered to free alternatives. The Taliban have refused.

“The parties are closer than ever to the start of intra-Afghan negotiations, the key next step to ending Afghanistan’s 40-year long war," said the U.S. State Department statement. “Although significant progress has been made on prisoner exchanges, the issue requires additional effort to fully resolve.”

The Taliban's political spokesman earlier this week said it was ready to hold talks with Kabul's political leaders after the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha at the end of the month, providing the prisoner release is completed.

A big worry for Pakistan is the presence in Afghanistan of militants, particularly linked to the TTP or Jamaat-ul-Ahrar or Lashkar-e-Islam, as well as those with the Baluchistan Liberation Army, which has taken responsibility for high-profile attacks this month in the southern Sindh province as well as in southwestern Baluchistan Province. Several Pakistan military personnel have been killed this month in southwestern Baluchistan province in battle with insurgents.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 26, 2020 at 11:24am

#Bangladesh-#Pakistan ties: #ImranKhan-#Hasina Talks Stir Unease in #Delhi. #India suspects #China's role https://www.deccanherald.com/national/pakistan-bangladesh-ties-imra... @deccanherald

A phone call between the Prime Ministers of Pakistan and Bangladesh earlier this week stirred unease in New Delhi, which suspected China's hidden hand behind the rare outreach.


Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan called up his Bangladesh counterpart Sheikh Hasina on July 22. A Bangladesh government spokesperson in Dhaka said that Hasina briefed Khan about the Covid-19 pandemic and the flood situation in her country in resp...

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 2, 2020 at 6:40pm

Iran recruited #Karachi gangster Uzair Baloch hurts #Pakistan-#Iran ties. "They don't simply try to penetrate typical networks that surround singular theological interests, for instance the Shia community. Iranians have historically used criminal networks" https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/pakistan-iran-gangster-uzair-bal...

Earlier this month, a special investigations team in Pakistan revealed that a much-feared Karachi gangster had confessed to spying for Iran.

Uzair Baloch, the leader of the Peoples' Aman Committee (PAC) group, reportedly fessed up to spying for Iranian intelligence agencies in 2014.

The Sindh province's Home Department released a report on 6 July detailing allegations that Baloch had provided "secret information and sketches regarding army installations and officials to foreign agents".

But why are these revelations coming out now? And what does the case reveal about the complicated relations between Tehran and Islamabad?

A Joint Interrogation Team (JIT) composed of intelligence officers and law enforcement officials has brought charges against Baloch, who was detained in April 2017, for 55 crimes including extortion, drug trafficking, kidnapping and espionage.

The PAC was in 2008 nominally founded as a support group for the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the centre-left political party that has ruled Pakistan for much of its post-independence history. Notorious gangster Sardar Abdul Baloch aka Rehman Dakait, its principle founder, was killed in a police encounter in 2009. Following Dakait's death, Uzair Baloch took over the
leadership role.

Baloch's violent and illegal activities in Karachi, the biggest metropolis in Pakistan, led to a severe crackdown on organised crime, subsequently pushing the interior ministry to ban the PAC in 2011 under the Anti-Terrorism Act. Amid a military and police crackdown, Baloch fled to Iran in 2013, thanks to Iranian residency documents he obtained in 2006 via a relative, the JIT report read.

According to the same report, once Baloch settled in Iran after leaving Karachi, he was in contact with a man named Hajji Nasir, who arranged to have him move to Tehran.

While Nasir reportedly offered to help Baloch move to the Iranian capital and grant him free accommodation, it was only later that he shared that he was on good terms with Iranian intelligence agencies and could arrange a meeting.

It was then that Baloch "shared information about certain army installations and armed officials," according to the JIT report.

There is much confusion regarding Baloch's arrest. In 2014 Interpol arrested Baloch in Dubai, then the military in Pakistan announced that he was in custody in 2016. As his trial was held at a closed military court, therefore, no details have been shared publicly regarding specific details of the information shared with the Iranian intelligence agencies.

The Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) in Islamabad has not responded to Middle East Eye's repeated requests for comment. The Iranian consul-general in Karachi meanwhile declined to comment on the case.

Philip Smyth, a fellow at The Washington Institute think-tank, told Middle East Eye that the collaboration of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with Baloch was part of a broader strategy of recruitment of criminal gang leaders.

"They don't simply try to penetrate typical networks that surround singular theological interests, for instance the Shia [Muslim] community. Iranians have historically used criminal networks," Smyth said, pointing to documents made public by WikiLeaks alleging Iran tried to recruit Mexican criminal syndicate Los Zetas to assassinate a Saudi diplomat in the US in 2011.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 3, 2020 at 10:27am

Hamid Ansari, ex VP of #India & ex ambassador in #Tehran, accused of failing to protect #India #intelligence #RAW's undercover operatives in #Iran in 4 major incidents of kidnapping by SAVAK (aka Sazman-e Ettela’at va Amniat-e Melli-e Iran) agents.
https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/ex-raw-officers-want-pm-act...


Former Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) officers had sought an inquiry against former Indian Vice President Hamid Ansari for what they have called “damaging R&AW operations” while he was posted as Ambassador in Tehran, Iran. They now hope that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will get into the truth of the entire matter. These officers, who were posted in Tehran during Ansari’s tenure, had first approached the PM in August 2017. Ansari was posted in Tehran from 1990-1992.

One of the officers, N.K. Sood, who retired from the agency in 2010, told The Sunday Guardian that Ansari even went to the extent of recommending the closing down of R&AW stations in Iran.


Sood listed multiple instances which showed that Ansari, during his tenure in Tehran, did not fulfill his duty as was expected from him.

In May 1991, one Indian official, Sandeep Kapoor, was kidnapped from the Tehran airport, ostensibly by SAVAK. When the issue was brought before Ansari, he played it down despite the R&AW station chief—who was in Dubai when the incident took place, but flew back considering the emergency situation—briefing him personally on the matter. “Ansari did not take any steps to trace Kapoor, but sent a confidential report to the MEA that Kapoor was missing and that his activities were suspected in Iran as he was said to be involved with some local woman. He deliberately failed to mention that R&AW had reported about involvement of SAVAK in this case,” Sood said.

Three days later, an anonymous phone call to the Indian Embassy informed the receiver that Kapoor is lying at a particular place on the road side. He was drugged, the effects of which lasted for several years. Despite R&AW’s advise to report and lodge a protest with the Iranian foreign office, Ansari did not take any action.

In August 1991, R&AW was keeping eyes on Kashmiri youths who were regularly visiting Qom, a religious center of Iran, and were taking arms training. Despite the old R&AW staff advising him not to do so, the new station chief of R&AW told Ansari about his operation. “Ansari gave the name of the officer who was handling this operation, D.B. Mathur, to the Iranian Foreign office, who passed it to SAVAK, and Mathur was picked up by them on a morning while coming to the Indian embassy. By the evening, it was clear that he has been picked up by SAVAK,” Sood recalled.

This incident has also been mentioned in the letter that has been shared with Prime Minister Modi. When Ansari refused to take any concrete action, apart from registering a missing report about Mathur with the Iranian Foreign office and sharing it with Delhi without mentioning that he was likely to be picked by SAVAK, the R&AW officers, on the second day, through a scene out of a spy movie, managed to inform Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Delhi, who then told this to P.V. Narasimha Rao, the then Prime Minister, which led to the release of Mathur from Evin prison, where he was kept, on the fourth day of his kidnapping, but he was given 72 hours to leave the country. Once inside the Indian Embassy, Mathur disclosed what had happened to him and how the SAVAK was already aware of the identity of Sood and the station chief, which the letter says can be attributed to Ansari sharing it with the Iranian Foreign Office.

These officers believe and are extremely hopeful that PM Modi will order a thorough probe into this issue, which damaged India’s strategic capabilities deeply.

The Sunday Guardian also reached out to the office of V.P. Ansari through emails, seeking his response on the charges leveled by the R&AW officers. However, no response was received till the time of the story going to press.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 24, 2020 at 4:27pm

#Iran sourced #fakenews at work to strain #Saudi-#Pakistan bilateral ties. Dawn Newspaper's Tanveer Arain fooled by "Saudi Defense Minister calls #Pakistani "slaves" story. https://www.thequint.com/news/fake-news-saudi-arabia-calls-pakistan...

It is no news that all is not well in the Arab world. In the latest, it has been reported that Pakistan has offered to mediate between Saudi Arabia and Iran, in order to avoid strained relationships with both countries.

The spread of fake news, however, is a ready-made recipe for straining bilateral relationships.

Tanveer Arain, journalist and political analyst with some of the leading publications in Pakistan, including The Dawn, took to Twitter to draw attention to a letter, allegedly written by Saudi Arabian Defence Minister Muhammad Bin Suleiman.

The letter allegedly quotes the defence minister calling Pakistan a “slave country” and that “it will remain Saudi Arabia’s slave” country.

Tanveer’s tweet was retweeted 679 times, and was liked 605 times by Twitter users. His tweet also prompted Postcard.news to swiftly pick up story.

The story was shared 33,000 times on Facebook, from the Postcard portal. The story elaborately describes how Saudi considers other Muslim countries to be of ‘converted’ status. The story reads:

Muhammad Bin Suleiman believes that Pakistanis are the slaves of the Arabs. This statement proves that Saudis looks at every other Muslim country with the ‘converted-Muslim’ perspective. Muslims from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are called ‘Hindu-Muslims’ in Saudi.
The story was also picked by Defence Tube, a YouTube channel which has 7,800-odd subscribers and by a Facebook page on Indian Defence, where it was widely shared.

What The Letter Actually Says
Senior journalist Abbas Nasir, who was a former editor of The Dawn and has also been associated with BBC, was quick to raise that a Tehran dateline was dodgy for a story related to Saudi.

Mustaqbil Pakistan party leader Nadeem M Qureshi also responded to Taveer’s tweet about the letter being “fake news”.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 18, 2020 at 4:19pm

#Iran kicks out #Indian gas company. OVL and its partners had offered to invest up to $11 billion. #India #energy http://toi.in/5RU9ca/a24gk via @timesofindia

Iran has decided to prefer domestic companies over foreign firms

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 21, 2020 at 7:38am

Demand for #Pakistan Visas Sets Off Deadly Stampede in #Afghanistan, Leaving At Least 14 #Afghans dead! https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/world/asia/afghanistan-stampede-...

A stampede in a crowded stadium in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday left at least 12 women dead, officials said. The women were among thousands of people hoping to get visas to enter Pakistan for medical treatment.

Many people in Afghanistan, a war-ravaged country with minimal health care facilities, cross the border into Pakistan for treatment. But since the spring, Pakistan had drastically reduced the number of visas that it issued to Afghans, hoping to minimize the spread of the coronavirus.

Pakistan recently announced that it would resume issuing visas at a more normal rate. But there was so much pent-up demand that thousands of people gathered before dawn at the soccer stadium, in the city of Jalalabad, waiting for tokens to be given out that would enable them to apply for visas. Just 1,000 visas were to be processed that day.

About 10,000 people were in the stadium when the stampede occurred, said Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the governor of Nangarhar Province, which includes Jalalabad. The stampede began as the tokens were being distributed to the crowd, Mr. Khogyani said.


“There were several thousand women,” he said. “All of those killed were ill women who were trying to get a visa and go for their treatment to Pakistan.”


ImageA man injured in the stampede arrived for treatment at a Jalalabad hospital.

Pakistan, despite its tense relations with the Afghan government over its tacit support for the Taliban, is a key destination for Afghans. About three million Afghan refugees live there, and until the pandemic struck, there was a constant flow of Afghans across the border, seeking work or medical care.

The Pakistani Consulate in Jalalabad, which distributes visas for residents of seven eastern and southeastern provinces, recently reopened after being closed for nearly eight months because of Pakistan’s coronavirus travel restrictions. Mohammad Sadiq, Pakistan’s special envoy for Afghanistan, had recently announced a new visa regime that would ease the process for issuing long-term, multiple-entry visas for Afghans.

“The charges of corruption and mishandling of applicants in recent years had tarnished the image of Pakistan and caused hardship to visa applicants,” Mr. Sadiq said in announcing the new visa policy.

Continue reading the main story

The provincial authorities in Nangarhar announced the new procedure for distributing tokens to visa applicants, which was meant to discourage crowding in light of the heavy demand. Under the rules, the first 1,000 people would get tokens and the rest would have to try their luck the next day, Mr. Khogyani said.

“The stampede broke out in the women’s section,” said an eyewitness, Abdullah, who like many Afghans goes by one name. “Then police arrived and the situation got worse. I escaped from the stadium. When I came back, several women were lying on the ground and they were dead.”

-------------

Other security officials put the toll even higher. “I have counted 50 dead bodies and I have got tired of counting,” said Karimullah Bek, a pro-government militia commander in the area.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 5, 2020 at 6:45pm

Pakistan to complete 2600-km Pak-Afghan border fencing within two months. The $500m project also includes border forts, surveillance, intrusion detection system. Pakistan is fencing its borders with Afghanistan & Iran to curb smuggling, terrorists’ infiltration, illegal crossings

https://www.voanews.com/south-central-asia/pakistan-says-afghan-bor...

The pair of three-meter-high mesh fences, a couple of meters apart, are filled and topped with coils of razor wire, running through rugged terrain and snow-covered, treacherous mountains at elevations as high as 4,000 meters.

The ISPR attributed a "massive decrease" in the number of terrorism-related incidents in Pakistan to the border security project. Pakistani troops involved in building the fence have also come under deadly militant attacks from the Afghan side and in some cases clashes with Afghan security forces.

Afghanistan has historically disputed the 1893 British colonial era demarcation and Afghan officials still refer to the border as the Durand Line. Pakistan rejects the objections and maintains it inherited the international frontier after gaining independence from Britain in 1947.

Under the military-led border management project, Islamabad has also upgraded several formal crossings with Afghanistan to further facilitate bilateral and transit trade activities with the war-ravaged landlocked country.

ranian Border

The Pakistani army is also working on enhancing the security of the country’s more than 900-kilometer southwestern border with Iran. It has already fenced off about 30% of the frontier and the project is expected to be finished by the end of 2021, according to the ISPR.

The largely porous border separates Pakistan’s Baluchistan and Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan provinces, both experiencing militant attacks blamed on fugitive separatists hiding on Pakistani and Iranian soils

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 12, 2021 at 1:04pm

#Iran, #India to revive #Chabahar. India aims to compete with #China & #Pakistan (#Gwadar/#CPEC) by including #Uzbekistan in North-South Transport Corridor for #trade with #Afghanistan , #Armenia, #Azerbaijan, #Russia, #CentralAsia, #Europe .


https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2021/02/iran-india-chaba...

In a proactive move, India has made fresh overtures toward Iran, apparently sensing the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal is imminent.

Last week, JP Singh, the joint secretary for Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan at the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, paid a visit to Tehran.

Laying the groundwork for closer ties, he held political consultations with top officials and obtained updates on the progress at Chabahar, where New Delhi is funding a project to develop the port on the Gulf of Oman. The main purpose of this visit was to regain India’s lost foothold in the Iranian port project.

Then Singh also touched base with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, one of the main people involved these days in negotiations regarding the revival of the nuclear deal that is formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). New Delhi is seemingly awaiting the removal of sanctions on Iran before it engages in any large-scale projects or business activity in the country.

Indeed, there have been some positive indications in this direction from Washington. Encouragingly enough, Robert Malley, one of the main negotiators of the 2015 deal, has been appointed as envoy to Iran by the Biden administration. Likewise, the appointment of Wendy Sherman as deputy secretary of state also points toward a possible US-Iran rapprochement, as she had led the team that eventually clinch the deal.


First, if the nuclear deal is salvaged, there is more of the likelihood that Iran will stop “looking East” and maybe even decrease its tilt toward China. Instead, it would try to re-establish business with Western countries, as this is exactly what it had done in 2015 when the JCPOA was first implemented.

Second, as Iran and India already have a defense pact between them, an upgraded strategic role could have a negative impact on Sino-Pakistani projects in the region. Ever since China and Pakistan announced the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project, India cannot help but feel encircled. Moving in next door in Chabahar would be the ideal setup for New Delhi to keep an eye on developments in the Gwadar port and on Pakistan’s coastline.

Third, trying to break Chinese influence in the region, India would want to redirect Afghanistan and Central Asia toward its own routes. Having a pivotal role in advancing New Delhi’s ambitions, the port of Chabahar is center stage.

In case Iran does go ahead with the widely discussed 25-year strategic partnership with China, it could complicate matters, as Beijing’s prospective $400 billion deal includes access to all of Iran’s ports. In a recent television interview, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that the China-Iran 25-year deal will be finalized soon and that the two countries are not far from reaching an agreement.

Apparently, Iran continues to keep all its options open where regional alliances are concerned.

Finally, for a few years, spats between India and China have become a regular feature at their mutual border in the Himalayan region. As India gets closer to Iran, tensions between Beijing and New Delhi will start one more front.

Due to the constant maritime competition between regional powers, the Indian Ocean region has become a “key geostrategic space” as it connects the oil-rich Middle East with economic markets in Asia. Enhancing ties with Tehran can be quite useful for New Delhi, as Iran is one of the largest states in this region with an extended presence in the northern part of the Indian Ocean.

However, to some extent the success of India’s regional strategy will depend on the resumption of the JCPOA for now, as Iran’s reintegration into the world economy is dependent on the lifting of US sanctions.

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