Iran's Collapse and Pakistan 

Zaki Khalid 

 

 

Any assessment of 2026 has to begin with a structural point that predates the war by decades. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a highly centralised theocratic state administering a conspicuously heterogeneous population. Persians constitute roughly 61% of Iranians. The remainder comprises Azeris, Kurds numbering perhaps 12 million, Arabs concentrated in Khuzestan, some 2 million Baloch in the south-east along with Lurs, Turkmen and smaller communities.

Iran is not unusual in this; most states of comparable size are similarly plural. What is unusual is the degree to which the peripheral provinces where these populations concentrate [Iranian Kurdistan or Rojhelat and Sistan and Baluchestan] have been governed through a securitised paradigm that treats economic underdevelopment, cultural restriction and political exclusion as acceptable costs of territorial control.

The consequence is a chronic legitimacy deficit at the edges that becomes acute whenever the centre is distracted. The winter of 2025-2026 supplied the distraction.

Nationwide protests running from December 2025 into January 2026 [the latest in a cyclical pattern now familiar to anyone tracking Iranian domestic politics] were met with a crackdown that UN experts characterised as carrying aggravated discriminatory intent against minorities. Of 53,000+ arrests nationwide, 2,000+ were Kurds, a share of nearly 4% for a community that is a considerably smaller fraction of the population. Somewhere between 240 and 257 Kurdish protesters were killed by security forces. In Sistan and Baluchestan, executions of dissidents and the harassment of prominent Sunni clerics compounded a baseline of institutional discrimination that is both sectarian and ethnic.

Underneath this sat an economy in visible distress. The triggering of the JCPOA snapback mechanism by the European signatories in August 2025 reimposed comprehensive UN sanctions and the burden fell hardest where the margins were thinnest. Peripheral provinces that were poor in 2024 were destitute by early 2026.

The state’s characteristic error in these regions is not repression, as such; it is the deliberate conflation of protest with secession. Treating a demonstration in Zahedan or Mahabad as the visible edge of an armed separatist project justifies a kinetic response and the kinetic response then manufactures the constituency the state claimed to be fighting. By February 2026, that cycle had run for long enough that the separatist framing was no longer entirely wrong.

Then, on 28 February, the war involving the US, Israel and Iran escalated dramatically. Tehran’s response to the prospect of internal rebellion converging with external strikes was revealing: it pulled foreign proxy militias [networks the Quds Force had spent two decades cultivating across West Asia to project the Velayat-e-Faqih model outwards] back into the Iranian interior, deploying them from Tehran to restive provinces including Sistan and Baluchestan.

That decision was militarily rational but strategically catastrophic. It clearly signalled that the regular internal security apparatus was insufficient hence every armed group in the periphery read it accordingly.

Rojhelat

Historically, the Kurdish opposition in Iran has lacked unity. Decades of parallel struggle produced a landscape of parties divided by ideology, generation, patronage and grievance.

On 22 February 2026, six days before the war escalated, the principal Iranian Kurdish parties formally established the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan (CPFIK). The timing has been read by some commentators as prescient anticipation; the more sober reading is that the parties had been converging for months under the pressure of the winter crackdown and that the announcement landed where it did partly by coincidence and partly because everyone in the region could see what was coming.

The coalition’s composition is noteworthy. The Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), founded in 1945 and the oldest of the Kurdish parties, brought its socialist orientation and its long institutional memory of insurgency; it is suspected of having conducted attacks against regime targets in March. The Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), a PKK offshoot of leftist and revolutionary character, brought the Eastern Kurdistan Units [probably the most operationally capable Kurdish formation in Iran] together with an intelligence network run out of the Qandil Mountains. The fiercely nationalist Kurdistan Freedom Party proved the most kinetically active of the coalition members and claimed multiple attacks on IRGC positions in Kermanshah and Lorestan. The Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, social-democratic in orientation, joined on 4 March and concentrated on political mobilisation around democratic federalism, human rights and pluralism. The Organisation of Iranian Kurdistan Struggle, known as Khabat, carried a nationalist-religious Sunni inflection unusual among the others and contributed localised guerrilla operations along the border. Komala Toilers of Kurdistan, Marxist-Leninist in origin, supplied the labour organising that turned political grievance into general strikes during the winter unrest.

Thus, six organisations, spanning Marxism-Leninism to Sunni religious nationalism, agreed on three objectives: (1) the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, (2) the realisation of Kurdish self-determination and (3) the establishment of a national and democratic entity in Eastern Kurdistan.

The coalition’s public strategy, articulated by figures such as Hejar Berenji of the PDKI and Salah Bayaziddi of Komala, is explicitly sequenced. The first stage was Kurdish unity, achieved with the CPFIK’s formation. The second is coordination with other marginalised nationalities across Iran, with the Baloch and the Ahwazi Arabs named as the priority partners. The third is engagement with the mainstream Iranian opposition, conditional on those actors accepting that the nations within Iran’s borders are entitled to an equitable division of power and wealth.

The most significant thing about this programme is what it abandons. By setting aside maximalist demands for immediate independence in favour of federal power-sharing, the Kurdish leadership made itself legible to two audiences that would otherwise have been closed to it: (1) the Persian-majority democratic opposition [which will not countenance partition] and (2) Western governments [which currently do not have an appetite for sponsoring the dismemberment of a state of 90 million people]. In the CPFIK’s framing, federalism is a proven mechanism for resolving centre-periphery disputes, delivering cultural autonomy, language rights and local control over resources without redrawing borders. Whether this is conviction or positioning is besides the point. It works either way.

Militarily, the coalition mobilised thousands of experienced fighters along the porous Iran-Iraq frontier [most of them based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq]. On 28 February, CPFIK representatives announced that their forces were operating deep inside Iran and were prepared for a new phase of engagement, while publicly urging Iranian units stationed in Kurdish areas to defect. Tehran’s response was pre-emptive and heavy. The Iranian military, working alongside allied Iraqi militias, launched sustained drone and missile strikes against Kurdish opposition headquarters inside the Kurdistan Region of Iraq; Kurdish leaders claim 70+ attacks following the breakdown of earlier ceasefires including strikes on civilian camps under UN supervision. Inside Iranian Kurdistan itself, checkpoints multiplied and military units occupied civilian buildings [schools reportedly among them] in a pattern designed to make ordinary movement a matter of official permission.

Around all this circulates the question of external sponsorship. Speculation intensified through March that the CIA and the Mossad were considering arming the CPFIK as a means of further stretching Iranian military resources; US President Donald Trump publicly signalled support for a Kurdish offensive while drawing attention to the vulnerabilities inherent in Iran’s ethnic composition. The strategic logic is not new; institutions such as the [insidious] Foundation for Defence of Democracies have argued for years that Iran’s plurality is an ‘exploitable weakness’ and that ‘decentralisation’ [or, in the harder version, balkanisation] is a legitimate objective.

The counter argument is also noteworthy. Anti-imperialist critics contend that coalitions like the CPFIK function as instruments of American military pressure and that what is presented as ‘national self-determination’ is, in substance, the dismemberment of a unified state in service of great-power competition over routes and resources. One need not accept the framing to accept the underlying observation that a movement that becomes strategically useful to a foreign power acquires that power’s interests alongside its own [rarely on favourable terms].

Kurds have learned this lesson repeatedly, in Iraq in 1975 and in Syria more recently. The CPFIK’s leadership is unlikely to have forgotten it.

Sistan and Baluchestan

At the other end of the arc, Iran’s poorest province was undergoing a parallel but ideologically inverted transformation. The Baloch grievance in Iran is compounded in a way the Kurdish one is not. It is ethnic, it is economic and it is sectarian [a Sunni majority governed by a Shia theocracy that regards their confessional identity as suspect].

The economic dimension is stark even by regional standards. Roughly 45% of the province’s population lives below the extreme poverty line, with real unemployment in some districts estimated at between 40 and 65%; the functioning economy is substantially illicit: thousands of sukhtbaran (”fuel carriers”) move subsidised diesel across the border into Pakistan, an activity that is simultaneously the region’s largest employer and a capital offence in practice, given the readiness of Iranian border guards to shoot.

On 10 December 2025 [before the war and in response to intensifying IRGC counter insurgency pressure], the fragmented landscape of Sunni Baloch militancy consolidated. Jaish al-Adl, the Nasr Movement, the Pada Baloch Movement and the Muhammad Rasul Allah Group merged to form the People’s Fighters Front (PFF), known in Persian as Jebhe-ye Mobarezin-e Mardomi. The new organisation is headed politically by Abdul Rahman Baloch, with Mahmud Baloch as spokesperson, and articulates a fusion of Baloch nationalism and Sunni militancy aimed at overthrowing the Velayat-e-Faqih system and purportedly ‘restoring’ the economic, political, cultural and religious dignity of the Baloch.

Jaish al-Adl remains the operational core. Founded in 2012 by former members of Jundallah and hardline Salafist in orientation, it brings a decade of accumulated tradecraft; remote-detonated IEDs, ambush of border guard patrols, complex assaults on fixed IRGC positions and a logistical network of local cells running alternate routes down to the Makran coast to bypass state checkpoints. Its April 2024 operation [simultaneous assaults on IRGC facilities at Chabahar and Rask that produced dozens of casualties] remains the clearest demonstration of what the organisation can do when it chooses coordination over attrition. Ansar al-Furqan, a Sunni militant group with a distinct specialisation in attacks on energy infrastructure, contributes a capability aimed less at killing security personnel than at inducing economic and administrative paralysis across the province. The Nasr Movement and Pada Baloch, smaller nationalist and militant factions, were primarily absorbed to streamline command and control.

After 28 February, the PFF escalated markedly, claiming multiple lethal attacks on the IRGC’s Imam Hossein battalion of the Salman Brigade near Zahedan and assassinating senior law enforcement officials in Iranshahr and Dashtiari County through the spring.

Alongside the insurgency, the province’s civilian religious leadership grew steadily bolder. Maulana Abdolhamid, Iran’s most prominent Sunni cleric, used his Friday sermons at the Dar al-Ulum seminary in Zahedan to call repeatedly for an end to the war through diplomacy by placing responsibility for the devastation on the regime’s intransigence and urging the government to yield to public demands before the country was destroyed. The state [which does not hesitate to invoke moharebeh (”waging war against God”) to execute opponents] has conspicuously not moved against him. His standing makes him a red line Tehran fears to cross and so the pressure has been applied laterally: the Special Clerical Court was used to harass and ultimately force into exile other senior Sunni figures such as Maulana Fazlur Rehman Kohi, while travel bans were imposed on Abdolhamid’s family.

Simultaneously, Tehran accelerated a longer-term project of demographic engineering, advancing plans to settle large numbers of non-Baloch Iranians along the coastal Makran belt. Whatever its stated developmental rationale, the local population will be very likely perceiving this as an attempt to dilute an ancestral homeland. State-affiliated media coverage does nothing to dispel that perception.

Diaspora politics filled the remaining space. The Balochistan Peoples Party (BPP), operating from abroad, documented the pattern of political repression and warned that a regime which survived the American and Israeli campaign would take its revenge on the Baloch, Kurds and Arabs at a scale not previously seen. The Free Balochistan Movement (FBM), associated with Dr Shahzavar Karimzadi and Hyrbyair Marri, went considerably further; it described the Iranian regime as a ‘cancer’, formally appealing to Washington, London and Brussels to recognise Balochistan as an independent state and circulating a ‘Democratic Transitional Plan’ for Iran aimed at ‘national liberation’ for non-Persian nationalities while courting Kurdish, Ahwazi and Azeri endorsement.

The FBM’s conception of Balochistan has never stopped at the Iranian border.

Convergence without alliance

The analytically interesting question is not whether these two movements sympathise with one another. It is whether sympathy can be converted into capability. The answer [on the evidence of the first 7 months of 202 is a qualified ‘no’, but it matters regardless.

Areas of Convergence: The clearest convergence is architectural. Both the CPFIK and principal Baloch political formations have committed to dismantling the centralised/ Persian-dominated state in favour of a decentralised settlement. The CPFIK’s federal Iran and the BPP’s transitional structures are recognisably the same design. This overlap is not accidental; the CPFIK’s second-stage doctrine names the Baloch explicitly as a coordination partner and the FBM circulated its transitional plan to Kurdish and Azeri factions precisely to build an anti-theocratic consensus. Both sides have grasped that no periphery can bring down the centre alone.

The second convergence is tactical and it operates without any coordination. By opening high-intensity fronts at opposite extremities of a very large country, the CPFIK and the PFF compel the IRGC to bifurcate its domestic deployments. Neither front can be reinforced at scale without weakening the other and neither can be ignored. That Tehran resorted to importing foreign proxy militias to hold the south-east is the clearest available metric of the strain: a state with adequate internal reserves does not garrison its own provinces with Iraqi and Afghan auxiliaries. The consequence extends beyond Iran’s borders because manpower committed to Zahedan and Mahabad is manpower not available for regional force projection.

The third convergence is external alignment. Both movements have positioned themselves as beneficiaries of American and Israeli pressure on the regime. Calling for the government’s overthrow during a foreign war is a choice with consequences and both leaderships made it deliberately. It magnifies the threat they pose to Tehran and also mortgages their autonomy.

Areas of Divergence: Against the above, three structural obstacles make a genuine operational alliance improbable.

The first is simply geography. More than 1,500 kilometres of hostile terrain, saturated with Iranian internal security infrastructure, separate the two theatres. Manifestos can travel digitally but weapons, fighters, safe houses and real-time intelligence do not. Moreover, the two insurgencies are embedded in completely different external systems; Kurdish operations are inseparable from the politics of Iraq and Türkiye whereas the Baloch insurgency is tied to the tribal and highly permeable frontier with Pakistan and Afghanistan. They do not share a supply chain, a sanctuary, or a sponsor.

The second is ideological and it is severe. The armed Kurdish factions within the CPFIK [PDKI, Komala, PJAK] are rooted in secularism, socialism and democratic pluralism and foreground human rights, minority protection and women’s liberation in the idiom of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The most capable armed formation in Balochistan operates on a foundation of Sunni militancy and Salafism; it frames its campaign explicitly as a defence of Sunni dignity against alleged Shia ‘apostasy’. Jaish al-Adl also carries documented links to transnational militant networks; UN reporting has detailed cooperation with ISKP including provision of suicide bombers for joint operations against Iranian targets. Secular Baloch parties such as the FBM and BPP sit comfortably alongside the Kurdish programme but they do not control the men with rifles. Between the actual combatants of the two peripheries, ideological synthesis is mutually repugnant.

The third divergence concerns end-states. The Kurdish coalition has [pragmatically] settled on federalism within Iran which keeps Western sympathy available. The hardline wing of the Baloch movement has not. The FBM’s demand is full sovereign independence for a Balochistan encompassing both Iranian and Pakistani territory. These are not variations on a theme. One preserves the Iranian state and redistributes power within it while the other dissolves two states to create a third. No unified transitional blueprint survives contact with that gap.

Therefore, the cumulative synthesis is this: the Kurdish and Baloch movements are functionally allied but politically incompatible. Their convergence is real but emergent [a product of shared timing and shared adversary instead of a shared purpose]. It may be sufficient to overstretch the Iranian state but nowhere near sufficient to replace it or to govern what would follow. That distinction is very important because a periphery capable of breaking a state but incapable of succeeding it is the classic recipe for prolonged and ungoverned fragmentation, instead of meaningful transition.

Implications for Pakistan

Viewed through a structural-realist lens, Pakistan’s dilemma in 2026 is the familiar one of an aspiring [not an ‘actual’] middle power in an anarchic subsystem: it needs to balance acute internal fragility against externalities generated entirely by others. It has no vote on the course of the Iran war and no ability to stabilise Sistan and Baluchestan yet it will pay for both.

The border: The Pakistan-Iran frontier has always been porous, structurally underdeveloped and heavily trafficked in fuel and narcotics. What changed in 2026 was the character of the traffic. In the 6 weeks following the late-February escalation, 13,000+ people reportedly crossed into Pakistani Balochistan fleeing the conflict, primarily routing through Taftan-Mirjaveh and Gabd-Kumb-Rimdan corridors.

Pakistan has absorbed refugee flows two orders of magnitude larger. Its significance lies on a border management system that was already overmatched, in a province where the state’s writ is contested, at a moment when Pakistani security forces were being pulled in three directions at once. Unregulated movement through corridors that were barely regulated to begin with produced screening gaps and armed groups operating against the State of Pakistan used them.

The violence: The trend line in Pakistani Balochistan through the first half of 2026 is unambiguous. January recorded 27 kinetic attacks [a pre-war baseline that was already elevated, since it included the BLA’s Operation Herof 2.0 on 31 January, an offensive that generated 57 casualties among civilians and security personnel]. March saw 59 attacks [the immediate post-escalation surge]. May was the peak, at 71 [including a shuttle train bombing that generated 47 casualties in a single incident]. June brought a slight decline to 49 attacks, which is stabilisation only relative to May and remains far above anything the province was experiencing a year earlier.

Total fatalities in Balochistan reached 265 in the second quarter alone. The proscribed terrorist organisations Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF) were the primary beneficiaries of the disorder, using a destabilised frontier as staging ground and as a source of operational freedom that the State of Pakistan had spent years trying to deny them.

The transnational layer: ISKP exploited the degraded security environment on both sides of the border to accelerate recruitment and operational planning by drawing on the anti-Shia insurgency the PFF was prosecuting inside Iran to fill its own ranks in Pakistan. Overlaying this is a piece of proxy manoeuvring that deserves more attention than it has received: the Afghan Taliban have been reportedly killing Jaish al-Adl members in Afghan territory along the Iranian border [apparently to secure territorial and financial accommodation from Tehran].

Pakistan therefore faces, on the same frontier, an Iranian-aligned Kabul suppressing one set of militants while tolerating another set [Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan] that operates against Pakistan.

The diplomatic strain: Bilateral relations with Tehran have deteriorated towards the edge of military confrontation and the precedent for what that looks like is recent. In January 2024, Iran struck alleged Jaish al-Adl positions inside Pakistani territory; Pakistan retaliated within 48 hours with precision strikes on BLA and BLF sanctuaries inside Sistan and Baluchestan under Operation Marg Bar Sarmachar, the first time a foreign state had struck Iranian soil since 1988. Deterrence was somewhat established but at the price of normalising cross-border strikes as an instrument of first resort between two nominally friendly Muslim states.

As the PFF escalated through early 2026, Tehran returned to its habitual accusation that Pakistan provides safe haven and logistical support to Sunni militants [with the implication of alleged complicity or negligence on the part of the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment]. Islamabad’s response has been defensive in the literal sense: significant resources reallocated from interior counter insurgency to reinforcing crossings such as Taftan, with the south-western command placed on sustained alert. The strategic cost of that reallocation is the exact point. Every battalion watching the Iranian frontier is a battalion not conducting operations against the BLA in Kalat, Awaran or Panjgur; in other words, Iranian pressure on the border has an indirect but measurable effect on militant freedom of action in Pakistan’s interior.

The economics: Pakistan entered 2026 with crippling inflation, external debt distress and near-total dependence on imported energy. The war compounds all three. CPEC is the acute exposure. Balochistan is the corridor’s geographic lynchpin, hosting Gwadar and thousands of kilometres of associated infrastructure and the BLA’s opposition to Chinese investment is both ideological and operationally specific [Chinese nationals are a preferred target].

Apart from damaging assets, sustained attacks alter the risk premium on the entire corridor, deterring further Chinese and third-party investment and threatening to convert what was conceived as an economic artery into a strategic liability that entangles Pakistan in great-power competition it has consistently tried to avoid. Energy is the systemic exposure. Pakistan draws more than 80% of its essential petroleum imports through the Strait of Hormuz. Any serious disruption [IRGC asymmetric naval action, maritime interdiction on the Houthi model or simple collateral damage] would sever that supply within days and paralyse domestic industry.

The IMF’s March 2026 end-of-mission statement was explicit that the West Asia conflict was materially affecting Pakistan’s outlook through energy price volatility, a widened balance-of-payments deficit and enlarged external financing gaps. Beyond fuel, prolonged escalation threatens the livelihoods of millions of Pakistani workers in the GCC and therefore the remittance flows that constitute the load-bearing element of the country’s foreign exchange position.

Assessment

Three conclusions follow from the preceding analysis:-

(1) Pakistan’s interest is in a weakened but not a broken Iran. This is the uncomfortable calculation at the centre of Islamabad’s position. A strong/ confident Iran is an assertive neighbour [with a demonstrated willingness to strike Pakistani territory] but a collapsed Iran is worse, as it would mean the disappearance of the only counter party with any capacity to police the western border at all. Whatever Tehran’s failings in Sistan and Baluchestan [and they are extensive], the Islamic Republic of Iran currently absorbs a share of the enforcement burden along a frontier Pakistan cannot secure unilaterally. Replace it with a zone of contested authority running from Zahedan to Chabahar and Pakistan permanently inherits the whole border alongside a sanctuary problem that no amount of fencing will resolve. The most likely trajectory identified above [a periphery strong enough to break the state but too fragmented to succeed it] is the specific outcome most damaging to Pakistani interests.

(2) Baloch irredentism is not a foreign policy question but domestic one for Pakistan. The FBM’s claim to a sovereign Balochistan encompassing Iranian and Pakistani territory is the same claim advanced by the BLA and BLF against Islamabad and articulated by figures with organisational continuity across both. Any Western recognition of Iranian Baloch self-determination [however creative] creates a precedent and a legitimating vocabulary that will be applied to Pakistan within the year. This is the strongest reason for Islamabad to view the CPFIK’s federalist model as more preferable to the FBM’s separatist one and to say so where it can be heard. Federalism inside Iran is a settlement Pakistan can live with. However, partition of Iran along ethnic lines is not because Pakistan has the same ethnic lines.

(3) Pakistan cannot be, and should not appear to be, a party to this. The structural temptation runs in both directions and both are traps. Tolerating Sunni militant transit against Iran might purchase leverage in the short term but a permanent Iranian campaign of retaliation in the long term [with the 2024 precedent already established]. Acting as Tehran’s enforcer against Baloch populations [the role the Afghan Taliban seem to have accepted in exchange for accommodation] would delegitimise the State of Pakistan among its own Baloch citizens at precisely the moment that legitimacy is most contested. There is need for stronger border management, genuine intelligence exchange with Tehran on transnational groups and public refusal to be recruited into anyone’s regional design. This appears to be the most cautious yet effective way forward bilaterally.

Word to the wise: The BLA’s Operation Herof 2.0 was launched on 31 January 2026 [almost 4 weeks before the war escalated] and it was itself a sequel to an offensive conducted well before that. The Pakistani Baloch insurgency has its own drivers including provincial economic marginalisation, enforced disappearances, the political exclusion of Baloch nationalist parties from meaningful power and a generation of educated young Baloch who see no route into the State of Pakistan. Those drivers were producing escalation before Iran’s periphery caught fire and will continue producing it after the war ends.

Externalising a domestic insurgency is the most comfortable thing a state can do because it converts a problem of governance into a problem of border security [the latter is something the Pakistan knows how to fund]. The Iranian collapse offers Islamabad an unusually credible external explanation for a trend line that was already rising. Accepting that explanation would be the most expensive mistake available.

The arc of instability from Qandil Mountains to the Makran Coast is genuine and it now binds Iran’s internal fate to the security architecture of both South and West Asia. However, Pakistan’s Baloch problem was not imported across the Taftan crossing. It was made at home and it will have to be settled there.