Dawn’s Syed Rashid Husain, writing in the paper’s Business and Finance Weekly on 12 October, says Iran is moving trade through Balochistan, the Caspian and China while a US naval blockade of its oil exports stays in place.
He writes that President Trump said last Thursday the United States would not launch military strikes on Iran before the midterm election, and that the blockade of oil exports would remain in full force. Iranian export volumes, Husain writes, are lower than before but not zero.
What Dawn says is moving
Former ambassador Husain Haqqani, now at the Hudson Institute, is cited from a 29 September piece: sanctions are hurting Iran without the outcome Washington wants. Dawn also reports that Tajikistan’s Energy and Water Resources Ministry told Asia-Plus that Iranian oil and petroleum products began arriving late in August. The ministry did not give volumes, prices or the route.
On Pakistan, Husain writes that the two countries share a border of about 900 kilometres and that trade was $3.13 billion in March 2025. Cash and barter, he says, let Iran avoid dollar clearing. After Pakistan helped mediate a ceasefire in June, it allowed goods from third countries into Iran by road. When Iran tried to block the Strait of Hormuz, Pakistan designated six road corridors from Karachi, including Port Qasim, and from Gwadar, to the Gabd and Taftan crossings in Balochistan. Dawn says those crossings have carried daily goods as well as fuel, electricity and gas. The two countries are using a barter system and the TIR transit convention.
Russia, China and the limit of the routes
Iran–Russia trade is about $5 billion and is settled in rials and rubles, outside SWIFT, Dawn writes. The International North-South Transit Corridor, a 7,200 kilometre network set up in 2000 by India, Russia and Iran, is estimated by the Eurasian Development Bank to carry 30 million tons and earn Iran $1.5 billion in transit fees once finished in 2030. Cargo already moves on the St Petersburg–Astrakhan–Anzali–Bandar Abbas link. The Rasht–Astara railway is described as the next piece. Toward China, the main land route is rail from Yiwu and Xi’an through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, opened in 2014 and extended in 2025.
Dawn cites The Maritime Executive of 8 October: Iranian oil held at sea off Malaysia and China is likely to run out this month, and government revenue could fall to about 40 percent of what the budget had expected. A pipeline to Zaghmarz on the Caspian was built to import Russian oil for northern Iran, not to export it. Husain writes that neither Azerbaijan nor Kazakhstan is prepared to put Iranian oil into the Caspian Pipeline Consortium line or the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline.
