Iran's restive southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan has been shaken by a fresh string of armed confrontations over the past week, underscoring the persistence of a low-intensity insurgency along the country's border with Pakistan.
According to Iran's official news agency IRNA, two Iranian security personnel were killed on September 6 in an armed attack near the provincial capital, Zahedan. The men were reportedly delivering food and equipment to Basij paramilitary units when they came under fire. The report, attributed to provincial deputy security chief Ali Khalilabadi, said no group has yet claimed responsibility for the assault.
Days later, a second attack struck the province. Semi-official news agency Tasnim reported that Abdolraouf Eshaghi, a local Basij commander in the Parud district, was killed in what authorities described as a "terrorist attack." Details of the incident were not disclosed, and no group has publicly claimed the killing.
The latest bloodshed followed an Iranian security raid just one day earlier, in which authorities said three people were killed and nine others arrested during operations against what they called hideouts of "Islamist groups" allegedly affiliated with Israel and the United States. Tehran has repeatedly used such language to describe armed Baloch factions operating in the province, though independent verification of these claims is difficult.
Sistan-Baluchistan, one of Iran's poorest and most underdeveloped provinces, is home to a large ethnic Baloch, Sunni Muslim population in an overwhelmingly Shia state. The region has for decades been a flashpoint for clashes involving Iranian security forces, armed separatist and militant groups, and narcotics smugglers exploiting the roughly 900-kilometer, largely porous border with Pakistan.
The most prominent militant group active in the area, Jaish al-Adl (formerly known as Jundallah), has claimed a series of deadly attacks on Iranian forces in recent years, including an assault on a courthouse in Zahedan in July 2025 that killed at least six people, and an ambush on a police convoy in October 2024 that killed ten officers. Iran and the United States both designate the group as a terrorist organization. Jaish al-Adl says it is fighting for greater political and economic rights for Iran's Baloch minority.
The instability is not confined to Iran's side of the border. Pakistan's own Balochistan province faces a parallel insurgency led by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), and analysts note that armed groups on both sides have at times used the shared border region to evade security forces, recruit fighters, and coordinate operations — a dynamic that has occasionally spilled into direct friction between Tehran and Islamabad, including a brief exchange of cross-border strikes in January 2024.
Beyond militant violence, the province has also seen social unrest tied to economic grievances, including protests earlier this year over environmental damage from mining operations near the town of Taftan.
As of this week, Iranian authorities had not announced any arrests connected to either the September 6 attack near Zahedan or the killing of the Basij commander in Parud, and investigations into both incidents remain ongoing.
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