KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Iranian officials say that their border engineering teams have been deployed to begin fencing the country’s eastern borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As reported by Iranian media outlet Mehr News Agency on Monday, April 29th, Brigadier Hasan Mokfi, an Iranian military official, stated that the entire project, which includes a four-meter concrete wall, barbed wire, fencing, and road construction, will be completed within a span of three years.
He said that a budget of $3 billion has been allocated for the execution of this project.
“The project will be implemented in the northeastern region including the provinces of Mazandaran, Golestan, Khorasan-e Razavi, North Khorasan, South Khorasan, and Semnan,” the Iranian authority said.
Earlier this year, following a terrorist attack in Iran’s Kerman city that claimed the lives of nearly 100 Iranian citizens, the Islamic Republic announced its intention to seal its eastern border with Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of efforts to enhance security.
The Islamic State affiliate in the region, Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISKP), claimed responsibility for the twin blasts that occurred within a 20-minute interval on January 3 in Kerman city, situated about 510 miles away from Iran’s capital, Tehran.
In the aftermath of the attack, the Iranian Ministry of Interior reported the elimination of two individuals associated with the assaults. However, the ministry also revealed that one of the attackers, holding Tajikistan citizenship, had received training from IS-KP in Afghanistan’s northeastern Badakhshan province before entering into the country.
The border between Afghanistan and Iran has largely been porous over the years with drugs, weapons and human trafficking conveys crossing in abundance. During the American-led international military presence in Afghanistan, Tehran tried for years to use dollar cash smuggling from Afghanistan as a way to offset the disastrous impacts of the UN and American sanctions on its economy.
Since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, border tensions between the two neighbors have aggravated. Iranian border guards and Taliban fighters were involved in numerous border disputes and clashes last year.
It is not only the Taliban that the Islamic Republic is worried about. Tehran also accuses Islamabad of not doing enough to prevent Jaish al-Adl, a Baloch militant group responsible for scores of deadly attacks targeting Iranian security forces, from launching cross-border attacks against Iran.
Diplomatic relations between the two countries became temporarily strained following Iran’s missile launch and drone strike in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. Iran claimed to have targeted Jaish al-Adl militants in the region.
In response, Islamabad launched missile strikes, targeting hideouts of the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), which Pakistan considers a terrorist organization, in Iran’s Sistan-Balochistan province.
The strikes reportedly killed 11 civilians, with nine fatalities in Iran and two children in Pakistan.
In the past, Tehran has accused both countries of allowing illegal immigrants, drug smuggling, and sometimes terrorists, to slip across the border and harm Iran’s security forces.
Islamabad and the Taliban have not yet responded to Iran’s decision to fence the border although they have both rejected allegations of supporting terror groups in the past.
