Adnan Aamir
QUETTA, Pakistan—In the early hours of April 18, a group of militants in southwestern Pakistan blocked the coastal highway that connects the port of Gwadar, near the Iranian border, to Karachi farther east. The militants stopped six buses near a mountain pass and checked the identity cards of all the passengers. They singled out 14 members of Pakistan’s armed forces, and then executed them all.
People across Pakistan woke up to the disturbing news the next morning. Hours later, a coalition of three Baloch separatist groups, known as Baloch Raaji Aajoi Sangar, or BRAS, claimed responsibility for the attack. A coalition spokesman said that such violence would continue until China ceased all activity in southern Pakistan. The same group had previously claimed responsibility for an attack on the Chinese Consulate in Karachi and a bus of Chinese engineers in the town of Dalbandin, north of Gwadar.
Just last week, one of the groups in that coalition, the Baloch Liberation Army, or BLA, claimed responsibility for a deadly attack by heavily armed gunmen on a luxury hotel in Gwadar. “Our fighters have carried out this attack on Chinese and other foreign investors who were staying in [the] hotel,” the BLA’s spokesman told Al Jazeera. In another statement, the group added: “Expect more attacks China and Pakistan.”
Baloch insurgents are fiercely opposed to the Chinese presence in Gwadar, where major projects, including a new modern port, are underway as part of a costly building spree to upgrade infrastructure across Pakistan, costing tens of billions of dollars and all funded by Beijing under its mammoth Belt and Road Initiative. But to Baloch insurgents and separatists, all that investment and development is really about looting and plundering natural resources in Balochistan province, which they want to declare independent from Pakistan.
The repeated attacks by Baloch insurgents have limited the movement of Chinese workers in Balochistan and delayed construction of projects due to security concerns. Following last week’s hotel attack in Gwadar, Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, said, “Such attempts especially in Balochistan are an effort to sabotage our economic projects and prosperity.” The recent violence has again reignited the fears of security threats for Chinese interests in southern Pakistan. April’s bus attack, in particular, brought in a new angle: the apparent use of nearby Iranian territory by Baloch insurgents to mount their attack.
In the aftermath of the April bus attack, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry alleged that BRAS has training camps based in Iran, which it uses to attack Pakistan. The ministry wrote a formal letter of protest to the Iranian government and demanded it take action against what it called BRAS sanctuaries in Iran.
In the past, the Iranian government has been bitterly opposed to Baloch insurgents and separatist forces, since it faces its own Baloch insurgency in southeastern Iran, led by Sunni Baloch militants. But now Tehran seems to have shifted its policy due to rifts in its relations with Pakistan. Iran fears a growing Saudi presence in southern Pakistan, after Saudi Arabia recently signed an agreement to build a $10 billion oil refinery in Gwadar and invest in what had been a China-backed development program. Tehran worries that Pakistan is allowing Saudi Arabia to use Gwadar as a launching pad to destabilize Iran, by stoking the long-running Baloch insurgency. Just as Pakistan accuses Iran of harboring Baloch separatists like BRAS, Iran blames Pakistan for giving sanctuary to militant Sunni Baloch groups such as Jaish al-Adl that have attacked Iranian security forces in Iran’s Sistan and Balochistan province.
If Pakistan’s Gwadar port fails, the effects would ripple across Beijing’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative.
The April attack on the coastal highway took place just a week before the second Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. Khan was scheduled to attend the forum, so the attack put pressure on him and his government to protect Pakistan’s coastal region to ensure security for China and its interests before his high-profile trip to Beijing. Facing mounting pressure, Pakistan announced measures to increase security on its nearly 600-mile border with Iran, including setting up a new “frontier corps” to guard the border and constructing a border fence. Khan then visited Iran, where he and President Hassan Rouhani agreed to set up a “joint rapid reaction force” to guard the border.
Yet even these steps won’t completely prevent the movement of militants into Pakistan from Iran. The long border is porous, and it would be extremely difficult and costly to fully guard. Iran announced its own plans to fence its side of the border back in 2007, and that still hasn’t been completed. BRAS militants will find a way to get into Pakistan and stage attacks.
Iran, though, is now in a position to use these Baloch insurgents as leverage over Pakistan, so it may not want to fully seal the border. Given the tensions over Saudi Arabia’s influence in Pakistan, Iran will seek to pressure Pakistan however it can. Any cooperation on a joint border patrol will likely be limited; if anything, its announcement seems more like a way for Iran to claim that it is sincere about controlling cross-border infiltration into Pakistan.
Rather than dealing with security issues on the border, Iran has other goals in mind: namely, hurting Saudi interests in Pakistan. Tehran cannot openly oppose the Saudi presence in Gwadar, so allowing BRAS a safe haven in Iran provides more covert means. And here, the interests of Iran and BRAS align. The main target of the Baloch separatists is China, since they want to prevent Gwadar from becoming a functional port. The separatists believe that China is effectively colonializing Balochistan under the pretext of economic development tied to the Belt and Road Initiative. Blocking the port’s completion will automatically result in the failure of the new Saudi oil refinery in Gwadar, which is reliant on the success of the Chinese-operated port. Iran now has a vested interest in not allowing the Gwadar port project to succeed.
China completed the first phase of the port’s construction back in 2007. Yet a dozen years later, Gwadar is far from being fully functional due to the ongoing security concerns. Pakistan’s own tensions with Iran have allowed a coalition of Baloch insurgents, in the form of BRAS, to stoke and even heighten those security threats. If Gwadar port, so central to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, fails, it would ripple across Beijing’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative.
Beijing can’t let that happen. It will likely pressure Pakistan to straighten things out with Iran and prevent more attacks by Baloch insurgents. China has many ways to influence Pakistan—through loans, investments, defense cooperation and international support at the U.N. Security Council—and will likely use all of them to guard its interests.
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