How local people on Iran-Pakistan border got caught up in a crisis

Panjgur, a sun-baked district in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province, is known as the final resting place of five companions of the Prophet Muhammad.

Some people here grow date palms. Many others rely on smuggling goods and petrol from Iran to sustain their lives.

On January 16, Iran attacked a house in Panjgur, saying it targeted an alleged camp of Jaish al Adl militant group.

A day later, Pakistan responded with an attack on Saravan in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province. Both countries accuse each other of backing separatists. And in both cases the separatists are ethnic Baloch.

Essa Baloch, 50, a resident of Koh-i-Sabz village in Panjgur has started fearing for the safety of his family. The Iranian strike had killed two children, according to Pakistani authorities.

“In the past, too, Iran has fired missiles in the bordering towns,” he tells TRT World over the phone. Traveling to the district is difficult due to heightened security.

“The Iranian authorities think anti-Iranian militants live in our villages, but there are no militants here. We are all civilians. And we live with our children.”

Ethnic Baloch are spread over the border regions of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. They constitute a majority in Pakistan’s Balochistan and Sistan-Baluchistan of Iran.

Both provinces are sparsely populated but cover a large landmass.

“My own cousins live on the Iranian side of the border, which has been fenced in recent years,” says Essa.

“In the past, there was no border at all. We could mingle with each other with ease. But now, we have been cut-off from each other, let alone living in constant fear due to the looming threat of Iranian missiles.”

For locals like Essa, it’s hard to understand how deep rooted relations have soured. But geopolitical experts saw this coming all along.

A tinderbox of tensions

The ethnic Baloch people have been at the centre of the evolving relations between Iran and Pakistan.

“The attack inside Pakistan is unusual but Iran has in the last 25 years on occasions targeted anti-Iran militants based in Pakistan,” says Alex Vatanka, author of the book Iran-Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy and American Influence.

“But the hard reality stays: after years of promise of security cooperation, Iran and Pakistan are still badly divided on the issue of combating militants that operate in the Iran-Pakistan cross border regions.”

In the past, Iran and Pakistan have cooperated on security matters related to the Baloch-dominated regions. For instance, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, was the first state head of a foreign country to visit Pakistan after the latter declared independence in 1947.

Both countries have struggled to deal with simmering tensions among ethnic Baloch.

Selig S. Harrison, an American journalist and scholar, wrote in his book In Afghanistan’s shadow: Baluch nationalism and Soviet temptations that the Shah of Iran provided ‘30 US Cobra Helicopters manned by the Iranian pilots who pounded insurgents in Balochistan in the 1970s.

Relations began to strain after the Iranian Revolution replaced the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979. The cooperation between the two neighbours began to be replaced with competition, including over Balochistan.

“I do not believe that after the 1979 revolution in Iran, these two countries (Pakistan-Iran) ever had enjoyed a very friendly relationship. They have always been involved in some forms of proxy wars against each other,” says UK-based Iranian-Baloch academic Hoshang Noraiee.

The Baloch agitated for nationalistic goals in Iran. But most of the ethnic Baloch in Iran and Pakistan are Sunni Muslims. After 1979, Baloch people in Iran also began experiencing religious persecution.

This ultimately fanned Baloch militancy in Iran and led to creation of the militant group Jundullah in 2003. Jaish al Adl, the group targeted by Iran, is a breakaway faction of Jundullah.

Jundullah’s founder Abdul Malik Reki was an Iranian Baloch. Iran captured him in a daring operation when a plane he was flying in while heading to Kyrgyzstan from Dubai was intercepted over the Persian Gulf and forced to land. Tehran hanged him in 2010.

“While the Baloch in Iran are Sunnis, the state is Shia. So there has been a conflict there, and sometimes it takes a sectarian form as well—nationalist-cum-sectarian form,” says Rashed Rehman, a journalist based in Lahore.

“Over the years, Reki’s Jundullah has attacked and killed Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp soldiers in the border areas.”

On the other hand, Pakistan accuses Iran of supporting Baloch separatist groups such as the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF), which is behind deadly violence in Balochistan including attacks on Chinese workers.

“This crisis is less a product of Pakistan-Iran tensions-though they certainly have both been concerned about cross-border terror for a long time and more of Iran’s policies in the Middle East,” says Michael Kugelman, a South Asia analyst based in Washington, D.C.

“It (Iran) has become increasingly embroiled in the region’s instability because of the recent actions of its proxies, and this has made it more vulnerable to attacks, including a large one several weeks back.

Ultimately, what is happening on the border between Iran and Pakistan is part of an attempt to appease the domestic audience, says Aasim Sajjad Akhtar who teaches political economy at the Quaid-i-Azam university in Islamabad.

“Primarily, what Iran has done is a performative action to whip up nationalist sentiment to sustain the clergy’s (waning) legitimacy, which is not dissimilar to the Pakistani establishment striking back ‘terrorists’’ on the very next day.”