Eighteen Attacks in Eighteen Days
In mid-October, some 2,000 lorries were left stranded at Taftan and Gabd-Rimdan, the two main crossings between Pakistan and Iran, after Islamabad suspended border trade “to support counterterrorism efforts”. Days earlier, in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan province, a roadside bomb near Zahedan had killed a senior police official, and gunmen had shot dead the commander of a women’s Basij militia unit outside her home. In the same week on the Pakistani side, militants abducted at least 20 policemen in Mastung, and a roadside bomb killed an army major in Gwadar district.
The two insurgencies along this 900-kilometre border are converging. While the world watches Tehran, the Islamic Republic is quietly losing its grip on its south-eastern edge. If that edge gives way, the cost will land on Pakistan, and on the Chinese and American investments Islamabad has staked its economic future on.
A Coalition Built for a Weakened State
Baloch militancy in Iran is old. Sunni Baloch make up most of Sistan and Baluchestan, the country’s poorest province, and groups such as Jundallah and its successor Jaish al-Adl have fought the Shia clerical state for two decades. What is new is coordination and tempo. In December 2025, Jaish al-Adl and three smaller Baloch groups merged into the People’s Fighters Front (Jebhe-ye Mobarezin-e Mardomi, or JMM), according to FDD’s Long War Journal. The front now frames its goal as ending the Islamic Republic, not winning concessions for the Baloch.
Stay ahead of the geopolitical week.
MD Briefing delivers expert analysis across five global fronts — the Indo-Pacific, energy, geoeconomics, European security, and the Middle East — every Monday morning. Free.
The US-Israeli war on Iran, which began on 28 February, gave the front its opening. The Iranian rights group HRANA counted at least 63 armed incidents across Sistan and Baluchestan and neighbouring Kerman between 31 March and 10 October, with at least 94 dead. Eighteen of those incidents came in the final 18 days, more than in any previous full month. Most attacks kill one to three members of the security forces, and the targets are police stations, Revolutionary Guard ground units and the Basij militia: the instruments of day-to-day state control.
The Wrong Question About the Southeast
Most coverage of the southeast asks whether the Baloch can threaten the regime. They cannot, and analysts say so plainly. Mardo Soghom told Fox News the armed groups “can seriously weaken the regime’s control” but will not take over the province. Jason Brodsky of United Against Nuclear Iran points out that territorial integrity is a red line even for Iran’s opposition, so a Baloch-led movement will struggle to win allies in Tehran or Tabriz.
That answers the wrong question. The danger is not regime collapse but periphery collapse: the state survives in Tehran while it stops governing the edges. In the Saravan and Rask belt along the Pakistani border, that process is visible in the attack data. The Guards are raiding mountain positions with artillery and drones, as they did near Rask on 2 October. These are the tactics of a state that is contesting ground, not one that holds it.
Three forces are pushing in the same direction. First, the war has stretched Iran’s security forces. Units that would normally hunt insurgents in the south-east are needed against US and Israeli strikes, and to guard cities against a repeat of January’s uprising. Second, the war has wrecked the local economy. The US blockade of Iran’s southern ports and the suspension of border trade have choked the fuel smuggling and cross-border commerce that keep much of Baluchestan afloat on both sides of the border, and that have long given tribal leaders a reason to keep the peace with the state. Third, the JMM has proved more capable than its predecessors, claiming five operations in the week of 2 to 8 October alone, from Rudmahi to Nikshahr. One Kerman police official was shot dead on 8 October in an attack no group has claimed, but it suggests the violence is no longer confined to one province.
Pakistan understands this risk better than anyone, because it already lives with a version of it. On its western border, the Pakistani Taliban use Afghanistan as a sanctuary to rest, rearm and recruit. Islamabad’s mediation between Washington and Tehran this year was driven less by prestige than by fear of a second such sanctuary, as Jamestown’s Terrorism Monitor has argued. Iranian border guards, intelligence services and local administrators are what constrain smuggling and militant movement on the Iranian side. If they hollow out, Pakistan’s Baloch insurgents gain what they have never had: strategic depth.
They need little encouragement. Pakistan’s own Baloch conflict is decades old and has resisted purely military solutions, and the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) has been escalating since its coordinated “Herof 2.0” offensive in late January, which hit at least 12 locations and killed 31 civilians and 17 security personnel. Pakistan recorded 225 militant attacks nationwide in September, the highest monthly total in 12 years. Pakistani Baloch groups now field drone units: the BLA has claimed strikes on Gwadar port, and a second group unveiled its own drone wing on 30 October. In April, militants attacked a Coast Guard post near Jiwani, close to both the Iranian border and Gwadar, a sign the conflict is moving toward the coast.
That coast is where the money is. Gwadar is the terminus of the $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Beijing’s flagship Belt and Road project. Twenty Chinese nationals have been killed in attacks in Pakistan since 2021, and in January Islamabad created a special security unit for Chinese workers. Further north, Chagai district, home to the Taftan crossing where travellers and a customs official were abducted in October, is also where Pakistan is pitching its copper and gold to Western investors, including under the minerals agreement it signed with Washington in 2025. MD’s coverage of the Pakistan Minerals Investment Forum shows how much of Islamabad’s growth strategy now rests on that pitch. A lawless Iranian side of the border puts both bets, Chinese and American, inside the same insurgent operating zone.
That also exposes a contradiction in Washington. The United States designates both the BLA and Jaish al-Adl as terrorist organisations, yet its war with Iran is the main reason the latter is thriving. Tehran will argue, as it always has, that the insurgency is foreign-backed. Whether or not that is true, the effect of US policy is to weaken the one state that polices the Iranian side of the border shared with its newest minerals partner.
The strongest objection is that Iran has beaten this before. In 2010 it captured and executed Jundallah’s leader Abdolmalek Rigi and broke the group, and today’s attacks are still small-scale. But Jundallah was defeated by a state at peace, with its full security apparatus available, an intact border economy and a functioning relationship with Islamabad. None of those conditions holds today. Iran and Pakistan exchanged missile strikes over the same militant groups as recently as January 2024, and the border trade that bound both sides’ Baloch communities to their states is shut.
How the Edge Gives Way
Base case: a grinding insurgency (about 55%). The JMM sustains roughly the October tempo through the winter. Iran holds the cities and the main roads but cedes night-time control of rural districts around Saravan and Rask. Border trade reopens intermittently. Islamabad and Tehran deepen security cooperation out of mutual fear, which pulls Pakistan closer to Iran even as it courts US mining money. CPEC costs rise and Phase II projects slip, but China does not pull out. The key assumption is that the US-Iran war stays at roughly its current intensity.
Downside: a sanctuary forms (about 25%). Renewed US strikes after the midterms draw Guards units away from the south-east. The JMM takes and holds a border district or a crossing for weeks, and evidence emerges of shared logistics or drone technology with Pakistan’s BLA. An attack on Chinese nationals in Gwadar or on the coastal highway follows. Tehran, unable to reach the insurgents at home, strikes alleged camps inside Pakistan as it did in 2024. That would set off an Iran-Pakistan military crisis just as Islamabad is mediating between Washington and Tehran.
Upside: an economic ceasefire (about 20%). A US-Iran settlement lifts the port blockade and reopens border trade. Tehran, needing quiet on its flanks, eases pressure on Sunni Baloch clerics and lets the cross-border economy breathe. Beijing, protecting Gwadar, funds joint border markets and security cooperation. Insurgent recruitment slows because smuggling once again pays better than fighting.
The Crossing to Watch
The Islamic Republic is not about to lose Tehran to Baloch guerrillas. It is in danger of losing something less visible and, for its neighbours, more dangerous: the ability to govern its own south-eastern frontier. A hollowed-out Iranian Baluchestan would give Pakistan’s insurgents the sanctuary they have always lacked, next to the port and the mines on which China and the United States have bet billions.
Watch Taftan and Gabd-Rimdan. If Pakistan has not reopened trade at both crossings by mid-December, Islamabad has concluded that the Iranian side can no longer be policed, and it will be planning for a second hostile frontier.
Empires rarely fall at the centre first. They fray at the edges, and Iran’s south-eastern edge is fraying now.
