Three Gates Closed

Iran's trade by sea and air was already choked when, in five days in October, Pakistan and Iraq shut three of the land crossings it now leans on. Anonymous Iraqi sources say Washington asked for it. The governments that closed the gates say they are fighting smugglers and militants, and no closure has been reported on Iran's other five land borders. Iraq's next decisions on its remaining crossings will show which account is true.

On the morning of 21 October Iraq shut Sheeb, the crossing in Maysan province where Iranian food, building materials and pilgrims enter the south. Tehran found out afterwards. Its interior ministry pointed out that the agreement between the two countries requires notice for any closure longer than a day, and none came. Four days earlier Pakistan had stopped commercial traffic at Gabd-Rimdan and Taftan, stranding hundreds of trucks loaded with gas, rice and fruit on both sides of the Balochistan border.

Those gates carry more weight than they did in the spring. American warships have blockaded Iranian ports since mid-July, and the tracker Kpler has counted Iranian seaborne crude exports at zero since the second week of September. On 8 September the US Treasury sanctioned every remaining Iranian airline. Iran has leaned harder on road freight as the other channels narrowed, and its trade with Iraq alone ran above ten billion dollars last year.

Two political sources told AFP that the Treasury raised the crossings with Iraq's prime minister at the UN General Assembly in September. They said every crossing will close except one in federal territory and one in the Kurdistan region, and that Washington has asked all of Iran's neighbours to do the same. An Iraqi government official expects further closures to follow gradually. On 23 October President Trump said the war could end quickly and wondered aloud whether to "finish it off" or "let it wither".

The governments that acted describe something narrower. Iraq says it is reviewing security and installing detection equipment against smuggling, at a crossing in the province where its own authorities suspect militias of launching drones at Saudi Arabia. The same week it ordered Houthi offices in Iraq shut. On 20 October, the day before Sheeb closed, Tehran had announced that Baghdad agreed to expel Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, a strange concession from a government supposedly enlisted to strangle Iran. Pakistan cites smuggling and an insurgency that had already disrupted traffic at Taftan, and its army chief sat with Iran's president in Tehran three days after the closure. Pakistan is paying for the decision too, since Gabd-Rimdan carried more than 4,000 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas into the country each day.

No closure has been reported on Iran's borders with Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan or Afghanistan. Passengers still cross at Gabd-Rimdan. Three gates out of at least ten on two borders squeeze Iran at the margin and leave the road open.

The coming weeks will separate the two accounts. If Iraq goes on to close Shalamcheh, Zurbatiyah and Mandali, its other main crossings with Iran, the AFP sources will look right and the land route will have joined the sea and the air. If Sheeb reopens once its new equipment is in and Pakistan's trucks start moving again, the closures will read as two neighbours guarding their own borders in a war that keeps spilling across them.