Iran Sending More Troops to Afghan Border

More than 200,000 soldiers will participate in military maneuvers late this month near the border with Afghanistan, Iranian television reported Saturday.

The maneuvers, which would be the second such show of force in less than a month, follow an admission by Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers that its soldiers killed nine Iranian diplomats last month after seizing a rebel stronghold.

Iranian authorities have taken an increasingly firm tone toward the Taliban, which controls about 90% of Afghanistan.

Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s former president and still a political force, promised the nation that Tehran will avenge the death of the diplomats.

“I offer condolences to the martyrs’ families and promise them that we will get revenge for their blood,” Rafsanjani said in a sermon during Friday prayers at Tehran University.

Iran’s top security body said Saturday that the country could take “every appropriate action” to ensure peace and security in the region. The meeting of the National Security Council was chaired by President Mohammad Khatami.

“The council commissioned all relevant authorities in Iran to consider every possible channel for protecting Iran’s national interests and maintaining regional peace and security and to adopt appropriate measures for ensuring those purposes,” the Islamic Republic News Agency said.

The official quoted by the agency said the council had decided to maintain Iranian troops currently deployed at the border with Afghanistan “to protect Iran’s territorial integrity and prevent any possible challenge” by the Taliban.

Even before the Iranian envoys’ deaths, tensions had been building between Iran and the Taliban.

Iran sees the fighting between the Taliban and rival Afghan factions as a source of instability on its eastern border. It has tried to arrange a peace, but the Taliban twice has refused to attend Iranian-sponsored conferences between the warring factions.

Iranians are overwhelmingly Shiite Muslims, while Afghans primarily are Sunnis. Human rights groups have accused the Taliban of killing hundreds of the Afghan Shiite minority after seizing a rebel stronghold last month.

Eleven Iranian diplomats disappeared in that battle. After a month of denying any knowledge of the diplomats’ fate, the Taliban admitted Thursday that its fighters killed nine of them. Iran says the other two escaped and their whereabouts are unknown.