‘BLA does not represent Balochistan. It weaponises 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 sons went, and sat across from families grieving children who were recruited, radicalized and destroyed by an organization that does not care about Baloch rights; it cares about chaos. That organization is the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and I have raised my voice against it in the Senate of Pakistan with a consistency I will not give up because the people whose lives it is destroying deserve nothing less.
I am writing 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 outfit whose leadership sits comfortably abroad while young Baloch men and women die in operations they never fully understood they were in. The world must name the BLA and its elite suicide unit, the Majeed Brigade, under the UN Security Council 1267 sanctions regime. The Pakistan-China proposal has not been accepted, the 1267 Committee citing unmet technical thresholds, a decision that, however procedurally justified, did not occur in a geopolitical vacuum.
“BLA does not represent Balochistan. It weaponises Balochistan’s deprivation.”
Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province and among its most underdeveloped; the multidimensional poverty index exceeds 70 per cent. It is in this void that BLA inserts itself with deliberate precision. It is not opportunistic radicalization. It is the systematic weaponization of deprivation. Recruiters present themselves as champions of Baloch identity and use the language of nationalism to target youth between fifteen and twenty-five. Through encrypted platforms and sophisticated propaganda, they romanticize armed struggle, isolate recruits from family and moderate voices, and condition teenagers to see violence as mandatory. Many who end up as Majeed Brigade suicide agents entered that pipeline as boys who were told they were freedom fighters. They weren’t. They were instruments of an organization whose leadership has never lived in the suffering it exploits. These are not statistics. It is the children of Balochistan, devoured by an organization that calls itself their liberator.
The scale of violence should alarm any responsible government. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, Baloch insurgent groups carried out 938 attacks in 2024, a fifty-three percent increase from 2023, when deaths rose 80 percent to more than 1,002. The BLA alone claimed 302 attacks and over 580 deaths. In March 2025, it hijacked the Jaffar Express, killing at least thirty-one people and holding over three hundred passengers hostage. The Majeed Brigade, its dedicated fidayeen unit, carried out six major suicide missions in a single year, operating on a decentralized, networked model that makes it resilient to standard counterterrorism disruptions. These are not the figures of a grievance movement. These are the numbers of an organized terrorist enterprise.
BLA is not a domestic challenge. It is an instrument of regional destabilization with proven external sponsorship, including the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian naval officer arrested in Balochistan in 2016 who confessed to funding and organizing Baloch militant groups on behalf of Indian intelligence. Growing evidence of tactical collaboration between the BLA and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a transnational jihadist network, further dismantles any argument that this is a local separatist movement unconnected to global terrorism.
“Young Baloch people are not the authors of these attacks. They are the raw material, processed through a pipeline of radicalization and deployed by leaders who remain safely abroad.”
The United States, United Kingdom and Australia have each designated the BLA and the Majeed Brigade under their own national counter-terrorism laws. The US went further and issued a foreign terrorist organization designation in August 2025, citing direct threats to US national and economic interests. These 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 listing, free to move across borders, access financial systems and recruit internationally, is a direct threat to any US commercial or strategic engagement in the region. The gap between the U.S. domestic FTO designation and its position in the UN 1267 Committee is one that U.S. policymakers must close. The same moral contradiction applies to London as well.
The danger to regional relations is no less serious. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure investment and Balochistan’s biggest development opportunity, is a declared BLA target. But this is not just a concern between Pakistan and China. Any attack on a road, port or energy pipeline is an attack on South Asia’s wider economic future and a signal to terrorist organizations worldwide that critical infrastructure can be attacked with impunity. The international community cannot afford to send that signal.
The UN 1267 Sanctions Committee proposal was not accepted on legal grounds that the regime is targeting Al Qaeda and ISIL affiliates and evidence of such affiliation was insufficient. That threshold must be met and Pakistan is obliged to strengthen its evidentiary case. But the broader legal commitment in UNSC 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 the grip mean that the UN’s counterterrorism architecture may have been shaped by regional rivalries rather than the merits of the threat.
I began where I will end with the youth of Balochistan. The BLA claims to speak on their behalf. It doesn’t. It speaks to armed leaders in comfortable exile who direct teenagers into suicide operations and to external actors who see Baloch lives as useful instruments of geopolitical strategy. Lasting peace in Balochistan requires government reform, political inclusion, economic investment and resolution of historical grievances. But designation is an essential part of the answer; it cuts off funding, limits the mobility of leaders and removes the implicit legitimacy that the absence of a UN list currently provides. Every day the world delays, another youth 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 author is a senator
