Why Balochistan is turning more violent

ON January 31, Baloch fighters carried out synchronised attacks across Pakistan's Balochistan province, killing 33 civilians and 17 security personnel. The banned Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) owned up to the attacks, the biggest that Pakistan has seen yet in Balochistan.

The militants hit at least 12 locations simultaneously, including police stations, military facilities and government offices manned by civilians. At least two women fighters were involved in the attacks, one of them a suicide bomber who blew herself up outside an ISI office at Nushki in northwestern Balochistan. The coordinated attacks appear to have overawed the security forces, who later claimed that in the fighting that followed, they had killed 145 militants.

Pakistan's Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi captured the shock and awe of the moment with his remark that "these were not normal terrorists." He added the "India hand" allegation, which Pakistan has repeated in the last two decades without evidence. Naqvi, too, offered none, but he was right about one thing.

The attackers were not "normal terrorists". From the contested accession of Kalat that led to the first uprising in 1948 to as late as the early 2000s, the Baloch insurgency depended on low-grade guerrilla hit-and-run tactics. Militants would attack government infrastructure, such as gas pipelines, power lines and electricity transformers, and scamper into the hills. The insurgent groups were affiliated to some big Baloch tribe, such as Bugti or Marri, and led by tribal sardars, who were part and parcel of the Pakistan establishment.

Akbar Khan Bugti, hunted down and killed in Balochistan in 2006 on the orders of General Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan's military ruler, was a politician-turned insurgent and a former CM of Balochistan. At the time of his killing, he was a member of the National Assembly. Khair Baksh Marri, sardar of the Marri tribe, who played a leading role in the leftist insurrection against the Pakistani state in the 1970s, was a parliamentarian when he led the revolt. Bugti studied in Oxford. Both went to Aitchinson College in Lahore, a pillar of the Pakistani establishment. The political system had many open lines to them. Many leading politicians counted Bugti and Marri as their friends. Musharraf's refusal to negotiate with Bugti on his 14 demands, including for provincial autonomy and control over its resources, was a huge mistake. The fifth and the ongoing Baloch uprising was sparked by Bugti's killing.

Bugti's unaddressed demands were not new. They had been made by others too. Balochistan is the country's richest in terms of resources, with its deposits of oil and gas, minerals and metals, including copper and gold, a sample of which Field Marshal Asim Munir carried to the US to show to President Donald Trump. The Baloch people are marginal in Pakistan's extractive relationship with the province. Until at least the late 2000s, pipelines carried gas from the Sui gasfields to other provinces, but it was unavailable for most of Balochistan. Since 1993, Pakistan has been giving out mining leases to foreign companies to prospect at Reko Diq for gold and copper. In the 2000s, China, which had been awarded the Gwadar port project by the Musharraf government, was also granted a lease for mining in the Saindak copper-gold mines in Chagai. Now, Munir has dangled the same carrot before Trump, but last week's attack may have taken the sheen off those shiny objects in his briefcase.

Pakistan's exploitation of its largest but least populated province has been a festering sore that could have been addressed politically. Instead, the military, which has ruled the country for most of its existence, has opted for an iron fist, that has only made its challenge in the province more difficult than earlier.

Today's Baloch insurgency is much more aggressive. It is led by people who bear no political or social resemblance to the tribal sardars, who lived in camps on the rugged hills, but were otherwise Baloch elites whose politics was not anti-Pakistan, aimed only at a fair arrangement within the federation, with themselves as the main beneficiaries.

In contrast, Bashir Zeb, who has led the BLA since 2018, is a diploma holder in mechanical engineering. His father is a doctor and Zeb grew up in a middle-class home at Nushki, a small town in Balochistan, cutting his political teeth as a member of the Baloch Students Organisation Azad, founded by another middle-class professional, Allah Nazar, a doctor and now the leader of the Baloch Liberation Front. Neither man is a political moderate. Under their leadership, the Baloch insurgency has grown more violent, more ambitious. The BLA claimed the first suicide bombing in 2018, in which a bus carrying Chinese workers in Dalbandin was targeted. The BLA has carried out several other attacks targeting Chinese nationals and interests, including another coordinated attack in 2018, a precursor to last week's attack. The 2025 train hijacking, too, was claimed by the BLA.

Zeb and Nazar came into the insurgency scene in the time of social media, which has helped them address wider audiences and attract new recruits. The growth of an urban middle class beyond the capital Quetta, in southern Balochistan areas around Gwadar, such as Turbat, Panjgur and Khuzdar, over the last two decades, is a big factor. From these towns has risen a new generation of youth, more educated than their parents and angrier at their marginalisation and the excesses of the military.

The involvement of women in the insurgency is recent and came with the BLA's new leadership. Even when the conservative tribal sardars controlled insurgency, women stepped out of their homes to lead civil society protests to demand the return of thousands of men — their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons — who had disappeared, allegedly by security forces’ involvement. Their shift to combatant roles came to the fore with the 2022 incident of a BLA woman suicide bomber, another first for the Baloch insurgency.

The 30-year-old Shari Baloch's act of blowing herself up outside the Chinese state-run Confucius Institute, University of Karachi, appears to have motivated other women, and men, to join the BLA and volunteer for the "Majeed brigade", said to be the group's suicide squad. A year after Shari, Sumaiya Qalandrani Baloch blew herself up on a security convoy in Turbat. In 2024, a woman carried out a fidayeen attack on a Frontier Corps camp to mark the 18th anniversary of the killing of Akbar Bugti.

Experts say if Baloch women are ready to pick up the gun or wear a suicide vest, it is because they have been driven to the wall by the Pakistan state. Last week's morale-shattering attack by the BLA is a sign of the determination with which the new generation of Baloch militants is taking on the army. It signals a new turning point for the insurgents. The attack is also a not-so-subtle message to the big powers.

What next? The track record shows that the army, humiliated by the attack, will punish Baloch people more severely. The cycle of violence will continue. Accusations will be levelled against India, and Delhi will reject them, as it did to the latest one. But if there is one common lesson that history offers to the region, from Sri Lanka to India's Kashmir and North-East to Balochistan, it is this: blaming neighbours may play to domestic galleries, but it does not make challenges, whose geneses lie within, disappear or easier to overcome.