Border Battle Raises Tensions

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

Last week, Iran fired missiles into Syria, Pakistan, and Iraqi Kurdistan, claiming to target Islamic State affiliates in the first two, and an “Israeli Mossad headquarters” in the city of Erbil in the third.

Iran has been methodically consolidating an alliance of forces across the entire Middle Eastern battlefield. Calling it the “axis of resistance,” it started with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but it is rapidly evolving into something larger. Its other members now include the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.

Iraq and Syria are both countries whose governments are within Tehran’s sphere of influence, and where Iranian forces and proxy militias have a large presence. But an attack on Pakistan, a nuclear power, is a very different case, because there was immediate pushback.

The strikes by Pakistan in retaliation were the first external land attacks on Iran since Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded the country in the 1980s, launching a brutal eight-year war.

This current military exchange between Iran and Pakistan, however, stems from a more local cause. The Baloch are an ethnic group of some 10 million people who live on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border and into parts of southern Afghanistan.

In total, this area is roughly the size of France, but sparsely populated. The Pakistani province of Balochistan forms the largest part, followed by the province of Sistan and Balochistan on the Iranian side. They are the most impoverished regions of their respective countries, vast and arid provinces constantly battling drought, with rampant unemployment.

This restive region is where security forces of both countries have for years battled militant groups on both sides of the 1,000-kilometre border, which is difficult to navigate and control. Tehran and Islamabad have long accused each other of not taking strict enough action against the separatist Balochs in their own respective countries.

Efforts for autonomy or independence have been violently suppressed for decades by both countries. On the Pakistani side, separatist Baloch efforts are seen as an attempt to divide the country; on the Iranian side, things are complicated by fact that the Baloch are a Sunni minority in an otherwise predominantly Shia country.

Both states have taken correspondingly harsh action against them. In Pakistan up to 20,000 Balochs have disappeared in recent decades, presumably abducted, tortured or even murdered by Pakistani security forces, according to Amnesty International. 

Since 2014, the separatists have targeted projects associated with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a $58-billion project that is part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and large parts of which run through mineral-rich Balochistan.

Iran’s Shia clerical government has discriminated against their part of the  region economically and politically, and dozens have also been killed by Iranian security forces in recent years. Amnesty International said that in 2021 at least 19 per cent of all executions in Iran were of members of the Baloch minority.

So Iran’s strike on the Pakistani border town of Panjgur on Jan. 16 was aimed at the Baloch militia Jaish al-Adl, or the Army of Justice. Tehran holds the group responsible for several attacks on civilians and soldiers in Iran. The Iranian attack was likely in retaliation for a Jan. 3 bombing that killed 80 in the southern Iranian city of Kerman.

Two days later, Pakistan’s army retaliated with an attack on an Iranian village near the city of Sarawan. Their aim was to eliminate fighters of the Balochistan Liberation Front and Baloch Liberation Army, both operating from inside Iran.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry said its missile strikes had come in light of “credible intelligence of impending large-scale terrorist activities.”

No, Islamabad is not going to put a stop to the Iranian regime’s activities across the Middle East, including Balochistan. But the Pakistanis fired after being fired upon, and the Iranian regime has backed down, at least for now.