Pakistan resorted to raids, violence, terror against Balochs while US, Europe stand as mute spectators.
Rohan Giri
Pazeer Baloch, son of Muhammad Amin, was picked up from his home in Panjgur in November 2025. His family looked for him for months, hoping he would come back. Alas! he did not, but his lifeless body surfaced in Kech three months later.
A few districts away, Zareef Baloch who ran a small medical store, was taken by individuals his neighbours described as a state-backed death squad. Not long after, a twenty-year-old named Muhammad Fareed, the sole earner for his family after his father mysteriously disappeared, was abducted as well.
One could continue listing these names until the write-up runs out of space, yet Balochistan would still be overflowing with names of those who have disappeared, murdered by Pakistan’s hoodlooms.
Paank, human rights wing of the Baloch National Movement, counted 225 extrajudicial killings and 1,355 enforced disappearances in the province in 2025 and pinned the responsibility squarely on Pakistan Army, its intelligence agencies and the Frontier Corps.
Baloch Yakjehti Committee put the count at 1,223, the number of people forcibly disappeared that year, among them women, teenagers and two elderly men. Paank called its own report A Year of Repression. There was not much need to dress it up further. Islamabad would prefer that you overlook these human violations and acts of terrorism.
In first week of July 2026, Baloch fighters did hit back hard. Coordinated assaults across several districts during July 4 – 8 left 42 dead. Out of these, 38 were security personnel after a strike on a police post guarding the Mangi Dam project in Ziarat. Islamabad claimed this to be an unprovoked atrocity and violent.
However, Pakistan has stonewalled public questioning on what a province should do with decades of grief, especially when the perpetrators openly acknowledge their actions.
Military raids never really stopped for long enough to call them an aberration. Eighty-two enforced disappearances were logged in January 2026 alone, described by monitors as part of a pattern that is both widespread and systematic.
By June 2026, families in Jiwani near Gwadar were crossing into Iran after night raids and home demolitions, their children now out of school in a displacement that has become in the flattest possible sense, routine.
None of this began last week or even last decade. Balochistan’s insurgency has its roots back in late 1940s when the region was folded into a country it had not quite agreed to join and locals began accusing Islamabad of extracting the province’s wealth while leaving its children without schools.
Every uprising since has been met with a crackdown and every crackdown has quietly triggered next uprising, the way burning a field down to the soil somehow never stops it from growing back.
Then there is Gwadar where the whole thing acquires a price tag. Sixty-two billion dollars of Chinese investment sits on edge of this coastline, meant to give Beijing a shortcut past the Malacca Strait. The port, marketed as crown jewel of CPEC has pushed out local fishermen and wrapped the area in security restrictions that have hollowed out whatever economy was left, while the state treats requests for compensation as either terrorism or foreign funded subversion.
Ask to be paid for your own coastline and you risk disappearing. China has bought the port. It has not bought the people who used to fish beside it and every few months it gets billed for that difference in the form of an ambush on its own workers.
Widen the frame and neighbourhood looks nervous rather than helpful. As per reports, Pakistan’s army is already tied down along the Line of Control, Durand Line and its own fight with the Pakistani Taliban. So Balochistan becomes the front it cannot properly staff and a death squad unleashed instead of a school or a hospital.
Iran now hosts some of the families fleeing the area while keeping a wary eye on its own Baloch population. Afghanistan’s Taliban government stands accused of sheltering fighters who slip across a border that exists mostly on paper, a charge Kabul denies.
And, Bharat mostly shows up here as an excuse. Pakistani officials always have a ‘foreign hand’ to point fingers at almost by reflex whenever Balochistan burns.
Pakistan has never ever produced any verifiable evidence on this mysterious ‘foreign hand’ argument. This obviously is seen as an easy while lie for not reading its own human rights reports.
Those reports, for what it’s worth, are not being written by Balochistan’s enemies. European Union’s own GSP Plus monitoring mission flagged concerns in 2025 over enforced disappearances and the misuse of anti-terrorism law in a province that gets European trade preferences specifically because Pakistan promised, on paper, to behave better.
So no, this isn’t really an insurgency story at its core. It’s a story about the state that gave up on winning Baloch consent a long time ago and settled instead for manufacturing Baloch absence, one raid, one dumped body, one displaced family at a time.
Every operation with a grand name, Al Azm, Shaban and those before got Islamabad a week of headlines and left behind one more generation raised on funerals. Paank called it repression.
Baloch Yakjehti Committee called the raids collective punishment. None of the reports were written or belonged to Bharat. Baloch rights defenders spent years cataloguing their own dead because nobody else would and who are, even now, still waiting for anyone outside their own funerals to take cognizance.
(Author is a research scholar at Amity University, Gwalior, working at the intersection of socio-political research and media analysis. His writing engages with contemporary public narratives through a research-driven and analytical lens)