Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

SOUTH AFRICAN STATE AND ANTISTATE TERRORISM • 637been growing while more clandestine groups based primarily on ideologyrather than identity politics have been in decline.SOLDIERS OF JUSTICE. An Iranian state-sponsored Shi’ite groupbased in Lebanon that had the revolutionary goal of overthrowingthe Saudi Arabian monarchy in favor of an Iranian-style IslamicRepublic. The group is based in Lebanon and is composed of Shi’iteMuslims from Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. It is thought to have beenformed under the tutelage of the Islamic Revolutionary GuardsCorps contingent present in Lebanon.On 27 December 1988, Soldiers of Justice gunmen injured an officialat the Saudi Arabian embassy in Karachi, Pakistan. They claimedcredit for killing a Saudi diplomat in Bangkok, Thailand, on 4 January1989, an action also claimed by the Islamic Jihad in the Hijazorganization. On 29 March 1989 Abdullah Ahdal, the Saudi Arabianrector of the Islamic Cultural Center in Brussels, Belgium, who in thecourse of an interview on Belgian television on 20 February 1988 haddenounced the fatwa of takfir promulgated by Ayatollah RuhallahKhomeini against British author Salman Rushdie, was shot to deathalong with his assistant Salim Bahri, for which the Soliders of Justiceclaimed responsibility. The Islamic Republic of Iran had beenengaged in agitational propaganda against the Saudi dynasty duringthe Hajj pilgrimages from 1979 to 31 July 1987, when rioting killedmore than 400 people in Mecca. On 26 April 1988 Saudi Arabia severeddiplomatic relations with Iran and greatly reduced the size of theHajj pilgrimage contingent permitted to the Iranians.One explanation for the appearance and activities of the Soldiersof Justice is that such groups were being sponsored by hard-linerswithin Iran opposed to the apparent conciliatory foreign policy ofthe Rafsanjani government (1989–1997) toward conservative Arabregimes in the period following the death of Khomeini. Such terroristactions would have been intended to sabotage any rapprochementbetween Iran and Saudi Arabia.SOUTH AFRICAN STATE AND ANTISTATE TERRORISM. In1996 the South African government created an independent Truth andReconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutuand including 17 others, to bring to light the various cases of terrorismthat had occurred from the early 1960s, when the African NationalCongress (ANC) began armed struggle and the South African state