Saravan

Saravan is a city of roughly 100,000 people in Sistan-Baluchistan province, south-eastern Iran, situated close to the Pakistan border. It is the administrative centre for Saravan County and sits within the broader Baluch cultural zone, an ethnically distinct region where the population is predominantly Sunni Muslim in contrast to Iran's Shia majority. The city's border-adjacent geography has historically made it a corridor for smuggling and armed insurgent activity, particularly operations linked to the Baluch separatist movement.

On 7 June 2026 the IRGC announced that it had killed four anti-regime fighters in Saravan and seized weapons, ammunition, and Starlink satellite terminals in the operation. The seizure of Starlink hardware was explicitly highlighted by the IRGC as evidence of the Iranian opposition's use of satellite communications for coordination along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. The raid illustrates the regime's focus on disrupting modern communications infrastructure as an insurgent organisational tool, reflecting a broader pattern of IRGC counter-insurgency operations in the province that have intensified since the 2022-23 nationwide protests spread to Sistan-Baluchistan.