‘BLA does not represent Balochistan. “Weaponizes Balochistan’s deprivation.”
ISLAMABAD:
I belong to Balochistan. I have spent my political life in its dust, in its mountains and among its people. I have listened to mothers who do not know where their children went and I have sat in front of families mourning children who were recruited, radicalized and destroyed by an organization that does not care about the rights of the Baloch; he cares about chaos. That organization is the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), and I have raised my voice against it in the Pakistan Senate with a consistency that I will not abandon, because the people whose lives it destroys deserve no less.
I write today not only as a senator but as a Baloch woman who refuses to allow the suffering of her people to be exploited by a terrorist group whose leadership sits comfortably abroad while young Baloch men and women die in operations in which they never fully understood what they were joining. The world must designate the BLA and its elite suicide unit, the Majeed Brigade, under the United Nations Security Council 1267 sanctions regime. The Pakistan-China proposal has not been accepted, and the 1267 Committee cited unmet technical thresholds, a determination that, however procedurally based, did not occur in a geopolitical vacuum.
“The BLA does not represent Balochistan. It uses the deprivation of Balochistan as a weapon.”
Baluchistan is Pakistan’s largest province and one of its most underdeveloped; The multidimensional poverty index exceeds seventy percent. It is into this void that the BLA inserts itself with deliberate precision. This is not opportunistic radicalization. It is the systematic use of deprivation as a weapon. The recruiters present themselves as defenders of Baloch identity and use the language of nationalism to target young people between fifteen and twenty-five years old. Through encrypted platforms and sophisticated propaganda, they romanticize armed struggle, isolate recruits from their families and moderate voices, and condition adolescents to view violence as obligatory. Many of those who end up as Majeed Brigade suicide agents entered that pipeline as children who were told they were freedom fighters. They weren’t. They were instruments of an organization whose leadership has never lived through the suffering it exploits. These are not statistics. These are the children of Balochistan, consumed by an organization that calls itself their liberator.
The scale of the violence should alarm any responsible government. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, Baloch insurgent groups carried out 938 attacks in 2024, an increase of fifty-three percent from 2023, and deaths increased by eighty percent to more than 1,002. The BLA alone claimed responsibility for 302 attacks and more than 580 deaths. In March 2025, he hijacked the Jaffar Express, killing at least thirty-one people and holding more than three hundred passengers hostage. The Majeed Brigade, its dedicated fidayeen unit, carried out six major suicide missions in a single year, operating under a decentralized and networked model that makes it resilient to common counterterrorism disruptions. These are not the figures of a grievance movement. These are the figures of an organized terrorist company.
The BLA is not an internal challenge. It is an instrument of regional destabilization with documented external sponsorship, including the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian naval officer arrested in Balochistan in 2016, who confessed to financing and organizing Baloch militant groups on behalf of Indian intelligence. Growing evidence of tactical cooperation between the BLA and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a transnational jihadist network, further dismantles any argument that it is a local separatist movement with no connection to global terrorism.
“Baloch youth are not the perpetrators of these attacks. They are the raw material, processed through a radicalization channel and deployed by leaders who remain safe abroad.”
The United States, the United Kingdom and Australia have designated the BLA and the Majeed Brigade under their own national counterterrorism laws. The United States went further, issuing a Foreign Terrorist Organization designation in August 2025 and citing direct threats to American national and economic interests. Those interests are concrete: Washington has identified Balochistan’s vast reserves of copper, gold and rare earth minerals as a strategic priority. A BLA emboldened by the absence of a UN list, free to cross borders, access financial systems and recruit internationally, is a direct threat to any US commercial or strategic commitment in the region. The gap between the United States’ internal FTO designation and its position on the UN 1267 Committee is one that American policymakers must close. The same moral contradiction applies equally to London.
The danger to regional connectivity is no less serious. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure investments and Balochistan’s biggest development opportunity, is a stated goal of the BLA. But this is not just a concern between Pakistan and China. Every attack on a road, port or pipeline is an attack on South Asia’s broader economic future and a signal to terrorist organizations around the world that critical infrastructure can be attacked with impunity. The international community cannot afford to send that signal.
The UN Sanctions Committee’s 1267 proposal was not accepted on legal grounds that the regime targets affiliates of Al Qaeda and ISIL, and evidence of such affiliation was insufficient. That threshold needs to be met, and Pakistan is committed to strengthening its evidentiary case. But the broader legal obligation of UN Security Council Resolution 1373, which requires all member states to deny support to any entity involved in terrorism, regardless of ideology, has not been suspended. And reports that India played an active diplomatic role in maintaining control mean that the UN’s counterterrorism architecture may have been shaped by regional rivalry rather than the merits of the threat.
I began where I should end: with the youth of Balochistan. The BLA claims to speak on their behalf. It’s not like that. He speaks for armed leaders in comfortable exile who direct teenagers into suicide operations, and for external actors who see Baloch lives as expendable instruments of geopolitical strategy. Lasting peace in Balochistan requires governance reform, political inclusion, economic investment and the resolution of historical grievances. But designation is an essential part of the answer; it cuts funding, restricts leadership mobility, and removes the implicit legitimacy that the absence of a UN list currently provides. Every day the world lags behind, another young man is recruited. Another family loses a child. The international community has the legal tools and the moral obligation to act. The question is whether it has the political will. I am a Baloch woman and a senator from Pakistan. I will keep asking that question until the answer is yes.
The writer is a senator.
