Today from the BBC:
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have won a $2.5bn tender to build a railway route linking the south-eastern port of Chabahar to Iran’s rail network.
Transport minister Hamid Behbahani said it was part of a transit route for goods from Chabahar to the north-eastern border town of Sarakhs.
The Guards’ engineering wing, Khatam-ol-Anbia, has been awarded government contracts worth billions of dollars.
The BBC article puts the rail contract in context of the IRGC’s increasing influence in Iran’s economy and politics. Certainly a valid angle, but there is a bit more to the story. Chabahar is one of Iran’s coastal free zones, meant both to create Iranian jobs and to boost Iranian trade with Central Asia. The port was reinvigorated in 2004 and has been financed almost entirely by India, as a rival to Pakistan’s nearby Gwadar port (Registan has a useful backgrounder on the two ports here). The railroad in question will link Chabahar to the Turkmen border, thus giving India a trade route to Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan. The original article (Farsi) makes no mention of any Indian financing for the deal, but given the gobs of money they’ve spent on developing Chabahar I wouldn’t be surprised if they are paying for the rails too.
-WW
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