Home|The Friction Within: How Low-Level Insurgencies Drain Iran’s Strategic Focus
By Nima Korami
More than seven months into the war, the Strait of Hormuz remains a central pressure point, but pressure on Iran is no longer confined to the maritime theatre. Along its south-eastern and western peripheries, a low-level insurgency has persisted for more than a year, moving in some cases from border areas into provincial towns. And while the reported incidents do not support treating the February war as the cause of this insurgency – 11 of 27 incidents (41%) predate the 28 February 2026 start of the war, while 16 (59%) occurred afterwards -, they do indicate that the war may be increasing the cost of containing an already established insurgency.
Geographically, 18 of 27 incidents (67%) occurred in Sistan and Baluchestan, eight (30%) in the Kurdish region, and one (4%) in Kerman. The Kurdish theatre has also gained relative weight during the war: incidents there rose from 2 of 12 pre-war cases (17%) to 6 of 15 post-war cases (40%). This matters less as evidence of coordination between Baluchi and Kurdish insurgents than as evidence of dispersion with Tehran seeking to manage persistent violence across more than one peripheral theatre while simultaneously sustaining pressure around the Strait and maintaining a diplomatic track.
Operationally, on the other hand, evidence points to a tactical evolution on the insurgents’ side. The July 2025 Jaish al-Adl assault on Zahedan’s judicial complex brought small arms and RPG/grenade attacks directly against a state institution. In August, further urban attacks and a siege on a residential compound were reported in Iranshahr and Saravan. By spring and summer 2026, the pattern included drive-by attacks, patrol ambushes, checkpoint attacks and a high-altitude border clash. The shift is therefore less a move toward territorial control than toward repeatable attacks against security personnel and infrastructure. This shift, one can infer, enables insurgents to sustain pressure at relatively low scale thereby compensating for their inadequate capacity to hold ground.
Attribution, finally, is becoming more difficult. 11 of the 27 reported incidents (41%) are not assigned to a specific named organisation. This, in turn, should temper claims about a unified and/or coordinated insurgent campaign. The data instead point to a fragmented ecosystem of named groups, local cells and unidentified militants. In addition, Tehran’s own framing of incidents as counter-terrorism operations competes with reporting from Baluch and Kurdish monitoring sources thereby making attribution and casualty figures harder to resolve.
The war has provided the insurgents with an opening and this ought not to be surprising; after all, a state trying to hold a chokepoint and negotiate a nuclear file at once has limited bandwidth for containing, let alone eradicating, insurgents, and the Baluchi and Kurdish networks appear to have noticed. Even if each attack is tactically limited, repeated losses and recurring disruption can impose an unwelcome cumulative management cost on the regime.
Tehran’s dilemma is also asymmetric. Heavy-handed suppression may reduce immediate attack capacity while reinforcing the alienation and grievances that have both fuelled the insurgencies and sustained recruitment for decades. On the other end of the spectrum, restraint may lower escalation risks but is difficult to reconcile with a security model built around aggressive counter-dissident policing. The most plausible near-term outcome, hence, is neither collapse nor resolution, but continued containment at a recurring cost.
The regional dimension matters too. Pakistan shares a border and Baluch population with Sistan and Baluchestan, while the Kurdish region connects to a politically fragile and security-constrained Iraq. The reported incidents do not show coordinated cross-border insurgent activity (i.e. coordination between Baluchi groups in Iran with their counterparts in Pakistan) but if such a scenario were to materialise it would create incentives for tighter coordinated border controls between Iran-Pakistan and Iran-Iraq. More importantly, the key question for Washington and Iran’s neighbours is not whether 27 incidents are large in absolute terms, but in what ways, if any, their recurrence may begin to affect Tehran’s staying power; that is, its ability to move personnel, secure routes and sustain attention across multiple theatres.