Wahid operates a battered blue Zamyad pickup truck across the porous, sun-baked geography separating the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchestan from the Pakistani district of Panjgur. He is twenty-four years old. He does not hold a passport. He does not interact with the formal banking sector. His entire economic existence is dictated by the specific moods and operational directives of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps border patrols. Wahid transports smuggled Iranian diesel. He drives across unmarked desert tracks in the dead of night, carrying highly volatile plastic barrels stacked precariously in the bed of his truck. The formal economy abandoned the Makran region decades ago. The state in Islamabad provides no infrastructure, no employment, and no reliable electrical grid. The population survives strictly by moving illicit fuel across a highly militarised boundary.
