ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Interior Minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed has said fencing of the Pakistan-Iran border was 38 percent complete and would be finished by June this year.
The Pak-Iran border begins at the Koh-i-Malik Salih mountain and ends at Gwadar Bay in the Gulf of Oman, passing through a diverse landscape of mountain ridges, seasonal streams and rivers.
In recent years, relations between Iran and Pakistan have been strained with both sides accusing each other of not doing enough to stamp out militants allegedly sheltering across the border.

In 2019, the two nations said they would form a joint quick reaction force to combat militant activity on their shared border. Pakistan has set aside nearly $20 million to fence its 900-kilometer border with Iran, frequently used for trade and by minority Shia Muslims who travel from Pakistan to Iran for religious pilgrimages. But the border is also the entry point of a lucrative, illegal fuel trade that authorities have struggled to crackdown on for decades.
“Infiltration, smuggling and many illegal activities were taking place without any check on the Pakistani borders with Afghanistan and Iran,” Ahmed told Arab News in an interview on Tuesday. “Now, after fencing, these things will be controlled.”

He said the government was committed to stopping smuggling from Iran at all costs.
“We are going to stop and close all the petrol pumps which are using this smuggled oil,” the interior minister said. “One month back we started a drive against it and there is a very good response, but it will take some time to stop this.”
On the fencing of the Pakistani border with Afghanistan, he said work was 89 percent complete.
Responding to media reports that Prime Minister Imran Khan had approved the setting up of a National Intelligence Coordination Committee to oversee all intelligence agencies, with the head of the ISI spy agency as its chief, Ahmed said:
“There is not such an authority in which all the agencies were merged or working under it. All [intelligence] agencies are working on their own and giving their own performance reports and actions.”
He said all agencies shared their information with the National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA), which dispersed it to the relevant departments as well as the public.
“Agencies are doing their best. ISI is working on its own, MI [Military Intelligence] is working by its own; similarly, IB [Intelligence Bureau] and special branch are doing their work by their own, but off course the mother of the agencies is ISI and they are doing their best.”

Commenting on an alliance of opposition parties, the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), which is holding nationwide rallies asking for PM Khan to step down, the minister said the government would not create a hurdle in PDM’s decision to march to the capital next month but would act if they created a “law and order situation.”
“We are not under pressure and they can come to Islamabad peacefully and can stage a sit-in,” Ahmed said. “We will not create any hurdle but if there is a law and order situation, then the government can act.”
On Pakistan’s relations with Saudi Arabia, Ahmed said the relationship between the two countries had always remained strong and he would soon visit the kingdom to enhance cooperation in counterterrorism and other fields related to internal security.
“My ministry has very good contact with Saudi interior ministry and I have an invitation from them to visit the kingdom,” he said. “I will visit the kingdom very soon to enhance cooperation between the two ministries.”
“Saudis and Pakistanis are brothers and sisters and we have very close contacts. Our armed forces have very close contacts with each other while Prime Minister Imran Khan has also established very close contact with the Saudi leadership,” the minister said.

He was hopeful Pakistan’s relations with the United States would improve under the new administration of Joe Biden but said Pakistan would aim to maintain ties with the US without compromising its close relations with longtime ally, China, which has given Islamabad over $60 billion dollars for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor of energy and infrastructure projects.
“China is also close to our heart and we can’t lose the respect of China in any circumstances,” Ahmed said, “especially CPEC which is one of the great services for the development of Pakistan (from China).”