Fire raging in its iron heart, the first train pulled into what was then the obscure dust-blown village of Zahedan, in February 1919. The camel caravans from Nushki to Sistan took two months; now, on iron rails, the journey from Quetta to southeastern Iran could be made in two days. In months, a gurdwara and a Punjabi-language school sprung up in Zahedan, serving the truck drivers who ferried cargo to cities like Meshad. The journey took six weeks by camel but just four days when powered by Sikhs at the steering wheel.
The interior Balochistan desert had suddenly become a route for trade, historian Mikiya Koyagi records, part of the imperial British effort to contain the southward push of the Soviet Union. Balochistan, though, also became a site for the contesting claims of empires and nation-states, as well as borders that cut through the homelands and livelihoods of the region’s fiercely independent desert tribes.
Earlier this week, Iran conducted airstrikes on what it claims to be the bases of the jihadist group Jaish al-Adl inside Pakistan, just days after similar operations in Syria and Iraq. The Pakistan foreign office said the attacks killed two children but was silent on its failure to act against the Jaish al-Adl bases from where recent terrorist attacks that claimed 94 lives in the Iranian city of Kerman were launched.
Iran’s intelligence services have long been convinced, journalist Zia Ur Rahman writes, that Islamabad and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate are sponsoring Baloch jihadist groups, both to direct their energies away from Pakistan itself and to please its Western and Saudi Arabian patrons. The cross-border airstrikes aren’t the first—Iran issued warnings to Pakistan in 2019 and sent troops across the border in 2014. But as the two blocs clash from Lebanon to Yemen, a new front could be opening up.
“Allah,” a Baloch saying goes, “when making the world, used all the water, and grass, and flowers, and trees to make other beautiful countries. And when he had used all these, and had nothing left but a heap of earth, he threw that down and made Baluchistan.”
The poorest province in the region, though, is also one of enormous significance to the two countries across which it sprawls.
The birth of tribal rebellion
The closure of the Quetta-Zahedan railway line in 1931—a response to new laws by King Reza Shah mandating that exports to Iran from British India be matched by equivalent exports—transformed the region’s economic landscape. As organised trade collapsed, commerce fell into the hands of powerful tribes like the Regi, which began trafficking commodities like grain and sugar into Iran. Silk and silver flowed into British India. The two governments tried to stamp out trafficking and impose their order, but it led to frequent tribal rebellions, Koyagi writes.
Living with the herds in the area of Ladgash, in what was then Indian Balochistan, as well as Koh-e-Taftan and Mirjaveh, the Regi had served as mercenary soldiers for the British in the First World War and before. In return for protecting the railway and battling bandits, Regi chiefs were given weapons and ammunition as well as imperial grants.
According to Koyagi, even as the British ended their occupation of Iranian Balochistan in 1924, tribal raiding and rebellion continued. Though powerful Regi leaders like Idu Khan set about building a relationship with their new Iranian masters, they were viewed with suspicion by both Tehran and rival tribal chieftains.
The Iranian state’s efforts at modernisation—which included insisting conscripts clip their beards and wear uniforms—provoked Baloch ire. The tribes also resisted mandatory Western dress, disarmament and education at new national schools where their children were taught Persian history and language.
Expulsion of tribes from their homelands and large-scale violence were often the response. In some cases, the Baloch also left Iran for greener pastures. Thousands of families left for the Soviet Union in the 1920s, after being given free land in Turkmenistan. Many others resettled in Afghanistan. The Regis also asserted a claim to British citizenship, based on their service to the Empire, but this was eventually denied, writes Koyagi.
Across the border in what is now Pakistan, political scientist Alex Vantaka records, Baloch tribes sought autonomy as the British prepared to withdraw. The grievances exploded in Pakistan from the moment of independence. Though three of four princely states acceded to the new country, the sons of the Khan of Kalat waged war until 1950. Nawab Nauroz Khan began a new round of insurgency in 1958, and fresh fighting broke out in the 1960s and 1973-1977.
Iran, which had supported Islamabad in its war with India in 1971, worried that the collapse of Pakistan would open the door for its own Baloch people to rebel. Thus, it responded to these events by deepening repression. Following Pakistan’s defeat in 1971, however, Tehran-Islamabad relations deteriorated and slowly degenerated after the Iranian revolution.
The British railway line across the border briefly reopened after independence, only to shut down in the 1990s. Despite occasional talks of reopening it, the line lies dead.
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The turn to jihad
Early in 2005, Pakistan’s former military ruler General Pervez Musharraf asserted that the Army officer accused of raping an ethnic-Baloch woman was “100 per cent innocent.” The comments catalysed Baloch rage over the growing tide of ethnic-Punjabi businesspeople and contractors who had settled in the region, as well as the lack of opportunities for Baloch youth. Led by Bugti chieftain Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, the sixth Baloch insurgency began, ending in a brutal showdown with the military regime.
The effects of Musharraf’s efforts were soon felt. In December 2005, a bomb exploded near a car transporting then-President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during an ambush in the province, claiming the life of one of his bodyguards. Then, in February 2007, a bus transporting soldiers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was targeted in an ambush, killing 11.
Led by Abdol Malik Regi, the group responsible for these attacks—Jundollah—was the product of decades of discrimination against the Baloch people in Iran. “Regi’s foot soldiers adopted Sunni jihadist rallying cries over long-established Baluch nationalist slogans,” Vantaka writes, “and often clung on to al-Qaeda-type black flags over the leftist insignia of yesteryear.”
Inside Pakistan, meanwhile, the insurgency began to be taken out of the hands of the tribal chieftains by a new generation of middle-class educated Baloch who emerged from the Left-wing study circle centred on one-time insurgent Khair Baksh Marri.
Encouraged by General Musharraf, an Islamist coalition rose to power in Balochistan in 2002. Iranian Islamist groups from Balochistan were given shelter and training by jihadists fighting in Afghanistan. The move further alienated the young nationalists—and would, later, backfire spectacularly when Baloch jihadists began striking at the Pakistani state itself.
The rise of the Islamic State was key to the consolidation of jihadist forces. According to scholar Antonio Guistozzi, the Islamic State reached out to Iranian Baloch groups around 2014, through its key Afghan commander Abdul Rauf Khadim. In a series of meetings organised in Pakistan in 2015, Guistozzi writes, the Harakat-e Ansar-e Iran and Jaish al-Adl merged into the Islamic State.
Islamic State negotiators also reached out to narcotics traffickers like Hassan Khan, hoping to develop their ability to transport arms into Iran. But, according to Guistozzi, no deal could be made since he declined to end heroin smuggling.
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The geopolitics of terror
Iran and Pakistan have no interest in entering into a conventional conflict, but the missile strikes show frustration is mounting in Tehran. The ability of Baloch jihadists to strike in Iran’s major cities undermines the regime’s legitimacy at a time when it is already under pressure from democratic movements. Tehran routinely uses clients in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq to attack its adversaries. To its eyes, Pakistan is being used by the West to stage similar strikes, through the medium of the Islamic State.
Even though Balochistan appears remote and poor, its significance to both Iran and Pakistan is enormous. In addition to the region’s hydrocarbon and mineral reserves, it is home to Iran’s only oceanic port, Chabahar, while Pakistan’s Gwadar port is the closest maritime access point for landlocked Afghanistan and Central Asia.
Those equities have brought the proxy warfare of the Middle East to the borders of South Asia. As Pakistan faces multiple internal crises, from its economy to terrorist violence, it now has to contend with a battle with its volatile western neighbour.
Clarification: An earlier version of this article mentioned Zahedan as Iran’s only oceanic port. It has been updated to reflect the correct name, which is Chabahar.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)