Iran Struggles with Alternative Routes to Avoid Sea Blockade
Iranian Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani has told the semi-official Mehr News Agency that over 200,000 trucks use the Bazargan border crossing annually, and that in the last three months there have been 45,000 transits across the border.
The Barzagan crossing lies on the Turkish border with Iran’s Eastern Azerbaijan Province. The purpose of the spokeswoman’s comments was clearly to advertise how even if a sea blockade of Iranian ports was hampering imports by sea, then Iran had alternative routes for conducting trade.
There are substantial container-handling facilities at customs post on both side of the border. From Bazargan there are two truck routes heading into the heart of Iran, single carriageway roads in good condition converging on Tabriz some 170 miles distant on the primary Route 32. From Tabriz and thence to Tehran beyond, deeper into Iran, there is access to the Iranian railway system and the road network improves thereafter for long-distance trucking.
The rail route from Van in Turkey to Tabriz was disable by bridge strikes during the recent war, and despite Iran boasting of having rebuilt the bridges destroyed, services do not appear to have yet resumed.
Iran will also be making heavy use of its coastal fleet to trade unhindered with Russia across the Caspian Sea. Besides carrying news from the Bazargan border crossing point, the same Mehr News Agency edition carries the headline that Russia is Iran’s greatest friend and ally. Mehr also carried a statement from General Mohsen Rezaei, a former IRGC commander and currently a military advisor to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, that "no country is capable of blocking Iran's oil exports”, without providing details of exactly how.
There have been few if any indications that Iran is making additional use of land routes across Azerbaijan. What used to be a heavily-used rail freight route from Tabriz through Jolfa and thence to Armenia and Russia remains inoperative, and despite announcements made about improving the Iran-Russia railway connection through Rasht along the western side of the Caspian, little progress has been made and relations between Iran and Azerbaijan remain tense.
Iran is also connected to China by railway through Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, entering Iran at the Inche-Burun border crossing checkpoint in Iran’s north-eastern Golestan Province bordering the Caspian Sea. The first freight service on the route in 2024 took ten days to reach Tehran from Xi’an in China. The route is supposed to form part of the North-South International Transport Corridor, a key project for BRICS nations and the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. But the corridor through Inche-Burun appears to have not yet gathered momentum, possibly because of security issues and rail gauge-changes needed along the route. To illustrate, for the moment the IRGC still prefers to import the sodium perchlorate manufactured in China it needs to manufacture solid fuel for Iran’s ballistic missiles using carriage by ship, albeit it is possible the rail route is also being used.
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When pieced together, Iran has alternative import-export routes it can use, rather than relying on shipping - which has to breach the US-imposed blockade. But the alternative routes have capacity issues, are probably slower, and certainly add cost and complexity to Iran’s economic management dilemmas – all generally reflected in rocketing prices for basic goods in Iran and widespread shortages of essentials.
Top image: Locomotives chug up an incline in Iran's Alborz mountain range (David Gubler / CC BY NC SA 2.0)
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