Some disappeared are released, broken by torture. Some are formally charged. Some are killed and their bodies dumped.

Some human rights crises burst into international consciousness through a single image, a single video, a single act of resistance that the world cannot ignore. Other crises unfold in the dark, year after year, building a pile of unaddressed suffering that grows so high it becomes invisible. Balochistan belongs to the second category. It is the most underreported sustained human rights crisis in modern South Asia, and the international community’s silence on it is one of the diplomatic failures of our time.

The numbers, when assembled, are difficult to dismiss. The Baloch Yakjehti Committee documented over 1,250 cases of enforced disappearance in 2025. The Human Rights Council of Balochistan recorded 1,455 cases in the same year. Paank, the human rights wing of the Baloch National Movement, documented 95 enforced disappearances in November 2025 alone, along with 21 cases of severe torture and 20 extrajudicial killings. These figures, reflecting only what could be verified, suggest that what is happening in Balochistan is not occasional repression but a sustained campaign of state violence against a population.

The Pattern of Disappearances

The mechanism of enforced disappearance in Balochistan follows a well-documented pattern. Pakistani security forces, operating in plain clothes or in uniform, conduct raids on homes, often at night, and take individuals away without warrants, charges, or notification of family members. The detained person enters a network of informal detention centres run by the army or intelligence services, where they may be held for weeks, months, or years without external contact.

Some of the disappeared are eventually released, often visibly broken by torture, with explicit warnings against speaking publicly about their experience. Some are formally charged after extended periods in incommunicado detention and transferred to regular prison. Some are killed during their detention, with their bodies dumped near roads or in remote areas, in what Baloch activists call kill and dump operations. And some simply vanish, never accounted for, leaving families to wait indefinitely for information that does not come.

The targets of disappearance are not, by and large, militants. They are students, lecturers, journalists, doctors, lawyers, and human rights activists. Mahrang Baloch, the woman human rights defender who has emerged as the most prominent voice of the movement, is a medical doctor. Many of her colleagues in the Baloch Yakjehti Committee come from professional and academic backgrounds. The pattern is one of targeting the educated, articulate, and organisationally capable members of Baloch civil society, not just suspected separatists.

Some disappeared are released, broken by torture. Some are formally charged. Some are killed and their bodies dumped. Some simply vanish, never accounted for, leaving families to wait indefinitely.

The Recent Escalation

The crisis in Balochistan has escalated sharply since 2024. The triggering events have included a March 2025 attack by Baloch separatists on a passenger train, after which Pakistani authorities launched broad sweeps under the Counter Terrorism Department and arrested or disappeared several prominent Baloch human rights defenders. In response to peaceful protests organised against these arrests, Quetta police stormed a Baloch Yakjehti Committee gathering at the University of Balochistan in March 2025. A subsequent sit-in, organised by Mahrang Baloch and other activists, was raided by police using batons and tear gas at five-thirty in the morning.

The pattern continued through 2025 and into 2026. The provincial government’s approval of the Balochistan Prevention, Detention and Deradicalisation Rules 2025, signed off by Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti, was understood by human rights organisations as a state attempt to legalise the disappearance system that had been operating informally for years. The new rules permit the designation of individuals as suspects subject to interrogation in detention centres, formalising what had previously been an extra-legal practice.

Federal-level changes have made the situation worse. Amendments to Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997 now allow law enforcement to detain individuals for up to three months without charge or judicial oversight. This power has been used repeatedly against Mahrang Baloch and other Baloch Yakjehti Committee activists. The legal framework that emerged in 2025 essentially provides Pakistani authorities with broad discretion to detain whoever they wish for as long as they wish, with minimal accountability.

The International Response Gap

The international response to Balochistan has been thin compared to the scale of the crisis. UN human rights experts have issued statements. Some Western governments have raised concerns in private diplomatic channels. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have published reports. But there has been no sustained international campaign comparable to those organised around other comparable crises. There has been no UN Security Council attention. There have been no targeted sanctions against the Pakistani officials responsible. There has been no equivalent of the Magnitsky-style measures that Western states use for other human rights abusers.

The reasons for this gap are partly geopolitical. Pakistan has been treated as an important state by various Western governments, by China, and by Saudi Arabia. Each of these relationships has imposed costs on the willingness of those states to confront Pakistan publicly on its conduct in Balochistan. But the gap is not just about external geopolitics. It is also about the difficulty of access. Foreign journalists are largely barred from Balochistan. Foreign human rights observers face severe restrictions. The information space is, by Pakistani design, opaque. As a result, what is happening in Balochistan does not generate the kind of viral images and stories that drive sustained international attention.

This dynamic has allowed the Pakistani state to operate in Balochistan with a degree of impunity that would not be tolerated anywhere with greater external scrutiny. The pattern of disappearances has continued for over two decades. The international response has been incremental concern, rarely translating into structural pressure.

What Operation Sindoor Changed

Operation Sindoor, indirectly, has begun to change the international information environment around Pakistan. The detailed exposure of Pakistan’s relationship with Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba during the May 2025 conflict, combined with international attention to the Pahalgam massacre, has raised broader questions about the Pakistani state’s conduct. Some of those questions extend naturally to Balochistan. If Pakistan’s security establishment is willing to host UN-designated terrorists in major cities, what is it willing to do to its own citizens in marginalised provinces?

Indian diplomatic engagement with international human rights bodies has also become more sophisticated. The contrast between India’s open society in Kashmir, where journalists work and tourists travel, and Pakistan’s closed system in Balochistan has been highlighted in international forums by Indian representatives in ways that previously felt heavy-handed but now resonate more credibly.

The Baloch movement itself has become more articulate, more organised, and more capable of presenting its case in international languages. Mahrang Baloch’s prominence as a face of the movement has helped. So has the work of diaspora communities in Europe, North America, and the Gulf, who have built advocacy networks that did not exist a decade ago.

These developments are early. They have not yet translated into the structural international pressure that would force a change in Pakistani conduct. But they represent a shift in the information landscape that, if sustained, may eventually force the world to look more carefully at what has been happening in Balochistan for far too long. The first step is to refuse to look away. Operation Sindoor, by exposing what Pakistan does abroad, may help sustain attention on what Pakistan does at home. That is a small consolation for the families of the missing. It is not nothing.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

By organizing, leading, and, in some cases, fighting, Baloch women are challenging both state power and internal patriarchal constraints.

An extraordinary transformation is underway in Balochistan, one that unsettles long-held assumptions about protest, militancy, and gender in one of South Asia’s most militarized regions. Once pushed to the margins of political life and public dissent, Baloch women have emerged as the central force of a movement that is unprecedented in scale and distinctly indigenous in character.

From long marches demanding answers about enforced disappearances to visible participation in armed resistance, Baloch women are no longer peripheral to the struggle. Increasingly, they are defining it.

This moment marks a historic rupture. For decades, resistance in Balochistan was framed as a male-dominated, tribal insurgency—rooted in geography, kinship, and armed confrontation with the state. Women appeared mainly as mourners or symbols of suffering.

Today, that frame no longer holds. Political consciousness among Baloch women has been forged through loss, repression, and the systematic failure of peaceful avenues for justice, producing a movement that is emotionally charged yet politically sophisticated.

From Protest to Resistance

The immediate catalyst has been the persistence of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and collective punishment across the province, documented over the years by Pakistani human rights groups such as the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

Women—mothers, daughters, and wives of the disappeared—were often the first to mobilize publicly, precisely because men had been silenced through imprisonment, intimidation, or death. Their initial actions were resolutely peaceful: sit-ins outside press clubs, hunger strikes, and arduous long marches toward the capital of Pakistan, demanding little more than acknowledgment and due process.

When these nonviolent efforts produced no accountability, a profound shift followed. Baloch women began occupying spaces once considered unthinkable: leading mass rallies, confronting security officials, and, in some cases, joining armed resistance movements.

Footage released by the Baloch Liberation Army from the Nushki district, showing coordinated attacks on military installations with women visible in frontline roles, crystallized this transformation. The imagery was striking not only for its symbolism but for what it suggested—that sustained repression had expanded the movement beyond traditional gender boundaries.

An Indigenous Movement, Not an Imported Feminism

Despite their rising visibility, many Baloch women consciously reject identification with Pakistan’s urban, mainstream feminist movement. In interviews and public forums, they describe it as detached from Baloch realities and largely silent on state violence in the province. For them, the primary oppressor is not Baloch society per se, but the state’s security architecture.

This sentiment was articulated starkly by Dr. Shalee Baloch at the Saryab Literary Festival in Quetta, where she argued that the language of gender oppression imported from metropolitan centers fails to capture life under militarization. Her remarks echoed a widely shared belief that while patriarchy exists within Baloch society, it has been overshadowed by the far more intrusive violence of the state. When a man is abducted or killed, it is often the women who bear the longest and most visible burden—economically, emotionally, and politically.

The result is a movement that occupies a distinct political space. It neither mirrors liberal Pakistani feminism nor isolates women’s rights from national oppression. Instead, women’s emancipation is articulated as inseparable from the collective struggle for Baloch political rights, resources, and dignity.

Women at the Forefront, Not Behind the Lines

Crucially, this does not mean unquestioning alignment with male leadership. Prominent activists such as Mahrang Baloch have openly challenged men within Baloch society to support women’s education and political participation.

Addressing a massive rally in Quetta at the conclusion of a long march, Mahrang framed women’s empowerment as a measure of national self-respect, insisting that land, history, and struggle belong equally to women and men.

Her message captured a critical evolution. Baloch women are no longer mobilizing behind men as moral support or symbolic figures. They are organizing alongside—and often ahead of—them, setting agendas and redefining leadership in a movement long shaped by masculine norms.

A New Phase of Conflict

The scale of recent violence underscores the depth of this transformation. Coordinated attacks across multiple locations in Balochistan, reportedly resulting in significant casualties among security forces, drew national attention when images of female attackers circulated widely. For many observers, this shattered the assumption that militancy is an exclusively male domain.

Analysts argue that this shift reflects less ideological radicalization than strategic and emotional rupture. Political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa has noted in her writings on civil-military relations that when women enter insurgent movements, it signals the exhaustion of conventional deterrents. The cost of repression has become so normalized that even the deepest social taboos no longer restrain participation.

This pattern has been years in the making. The 2022 Karachi University bombing carried out by Shari Baloch, a highly educated mother of two, marked a grim turning point. Subsequent cases involving women such as Sumaiya Qalandrani Baloch and Banuk Mahikan Baloch suggested that female participation was becoming structurally embedded rather than exceptional.

Notably, many of these women came from educated, middle-class backgrounds, reflecting a broader shift in Baloch resistance away from tribal elites toward politicized, professional constituencies—a trend discussed in regional security analyses published by outlets like Dawn and The Friday Times.

Feminist scholars have long critiqued nationalism as inherently patriarchal, yet the Baloch case complicates that narrative. Here, women are not being asked to defer their rights until after liberation. They are actively reshaping the nationalist project itself, integrating gender equality into its core. By organizing, leading, and, in some cases, fighting, Baloch women are challenging both state power and internal patriarchal constraints.

Whether this experiment will succeed remains uncertain. What is clear, however, is that across Balochistan, women are no longer waiting on history. They are making it—forcefully, visibly, and at great personal cost.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view

The latest incident occurred on 27 September in the Dasht Konchati area of Kech, where Pakistani forces reportedly carried out a late-night raid. Two men — Altaf, son of Habtain, and Gulab, son of Ayub Baloch — were seized from the area. According to family members, no information has been provided by authorities about their location or condition.

Two days earlier, on 25 September, Saud, son of Haji Rahim, was taken from his home in Hairabad. His relatives remain unaware of his fate, heightening concerns he too has been forcibly disappeared.

Human rights activist Noora Marri, commenting on the pattern of detentions, said the situation has become unbearable for families across the province.

“Every week brings new names of disappeared Baloch men. Their families are left to suffer in silence while the state refuses to acknowledge their arrests,” she wrote in The Baloch Circle. “This cycle of fear must end.”

While several individuals remain missing, there have been a few recent releases. Sheeraz, son of Ghulam Qadir, from Barkhan, who was detained on 20 September, returned home a week later.

In Turbat, Siraj, son of Sanjar, was freed on 27 September after being detained the day before. Meanwhile, Asghar Karmdani has also been reunited with his family after spending three months in custody.

Security operations continue across the wider region. In Buleda, forces stormed homes in the Gardank area on Saturday, with local witnesses reporting gunfire in residential neighbourhoods — though no casualties have been confirmed. In Panjgur district, raids were conducted in Haji Isa Bazaar, Haji Hakeem Bazaar and Kadaan, where houses were searched and the surroundings photographed and filmed. No arrests or injuries have been reported in these operations.

For many in Balochistan, such raids — often followed by disappearances — have become a grim routine, reinforcing long-held fears of unchecked security powers and a lack of accountability.

The world must confront an uncomfortable truth: Pakistan does not merely fight extremism—it manufactures it, repurposes it, and unleashes it on its own people.

For decades, Pakistan’s security establishment has perfected a dangerous strategy: using extremist groups as tools of statecraft. While presenting itself as a frontline ally in the “war on terror,” Islamabad has quietly nurtured violent networks to crush dissent, manipulate politics, and control narratives. Nowhere is this duplicity more visible than in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest yet most neglected province, where Daesh-linked groups and sectarian militias operate under the shadow of state protection.

Daesh Sanctuaries in the Heart of Balochistan

Daesh has publicly admitted to having sanctuaries in Mastung and Khuzdar, two regions that were once strongholds of sectarian militants. Instead of dismantling these extremist hubs, Pakistan’s establishment allegedly repurposed them for political utility. Militants who once targeted Shias were redirected towards suppressing Baloch nationalists and silencing voices of dissent.

These sanctuaries offered more than mere safe haven. Training camps, recruitment networks, and financial channels enabled extremists to extend their reach across the province and beyond. Evidence points to these camps being linked to suicide bombings in Sindh and massacres of Hazara Shias in Quetta, demonstrating that Balochistan’s militancy is not isolated but integrated into a nationwide terror infrastructure.

The Rise of Shafiq Mengal: From Extremist Recruit to State Asset

A central figure in this playbook is Shafiq Mengal, son of former Balochistan Chief Minister Naseer Mengal. After leaving Aitchison College, he immersed himself in a Deobandi seminary and developed links with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group long accused of enjoying state patronage. By the mid-2000s, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had reportedly recruited him as a pro-state tribal leader.

Mengal founded the Musalla Diffa Tanzeem, a militia that became synonymous with abductions, torture, and extrajudicial killings. His death squads targeted activists, students, and poets who championed Baloch rights. What began in Khuzdar soon spread to Wadh, transforming peaceful regions into hubs of sectarian terror. Under Mengal’s leadership, extremists flourished, often acting with complete impunity.

Pakistan’s “Kill-and-Dump” Strategy

Since 2008, Balochistan has witnessed a grim pattern of disappearances and executions, a policy critics describe as “kill-and-dump.” Death squads like Mengal’s were instrumental in executing this strategy on behalf of the state.

A grenade attack on a Baloch Students Organization (BSO-Azad) rally took place in 2010. This was followed by targeted assaults on cultural events, which killed and crippled young participants. Abductions and executions of minors, such as Balaach and Majeed Zehri, further deepened the climate of fear.

Each incident reinforced the perception that Pakistan’s security agencies outsourced their dirtiest operations to extremists. This outsourcing provided deniability to the Army while terrorizing Baloch civil society into silence.

The impact of these networks was not confined to Balochistan. Suicide bombings in Sindh’s Shikarpur, targeted killings of Hazara Shias, and assassination attempts on political leaders like MQM’s Khawaja Izhar-ul-Haq all traced their roots back to Wadh’s training camps.

In 2016, the first captured Daesh suicide bomber confessed that he had been trained in Wadh, and that his explosive vest was assembled by a handler named “Maaz.” Such revelations highlight how Balochistan’s extremist infrastructure fed directly into Pakistan’s broader sectarian and political violence.

The Double Game of Pakistan’s Establishment

The strategic logic behind nurturing militias becomes clear when examining their political utility. Baloch nationalist leaders, students, and intellectuals became primary targets of Mengal’s squads. Writers, poets, and activists who articulated demands for rights were branded “Indian agents” and eliminated.

Even established politicians, including Sardar Akhtar Mengal, accused the Army of arming and protecting militias to suppress nationalist movements. The complicity extended deep into the political class. Caretaker Interior Minister Sarfraz Bughti, for example, has been accused of maintaining his own militia. This convergence of politics, militancy, and military patronage reveals how entrenched the system has become.

Pakistan’s security establishment has long practiced a dangerous double game. While presenting itself to Washington, Brussels, and Riyadh as a committed partner against extremism, it simultaneously sustains militias for “strategic depth.” In Balochistan, these groups are deployed to weaken nationalist movements. In regional politics, they offer Islamabad leverage in Afghanistan and India.

Figures like Shafiq Mengal are the byproduct of this strategy: once extremists, later repackaged as state allies, always indispensable for maintaining control. Meanwhile, dissenting voices are silenced through fear, exile, or assassination.

The Real Terror Factory

Behind the headlines lies a deeply human tragedy. Families of missing persons gather daily in Quetta and other cities, holding photographs of sons, brothers, and fathers who vanished at the hands of militias or security forces. Their peaceful protests are often met with indifference—or outright repression. Even demonstrations in Islamabad demanding accountability have been crushed, underscoring the hypocrisy of Pakistan’s claims to democratic governance.

Civil society remains caught between the hammer of the Army and the anvil of extremists. While families demand answers, groups like Daesh and Mengal’s militias operate with apparent freedom, enjoying access to weapons, vehicles, and funding.

Balochistan offers a sobering lesson in how states can manufacture and weaponize extremism for political ends. The Daesh footprint in the province is not merely about sectarian violence; it reflects a deeper policy of political engineering and state-backed terror.

The career of Shafiq Mengal illustrates this dangerous nexus. From jihadi recruit to Army asset, his rise exemplifies how Pakistan’s establishment uses extremists to crush dissent, control politics, and maintain its dominance.

The world must confront an uncomfortable truth: Pakistan does not merely fight extremism—it manufactures it, repurposes it, and unleashes it on its own people. Until this duplicity is acknowledged, Balochistan will remain a killing field where freedom is strangled, and extremists act as the silent enforcers of military power.

Speaking at the Convention for Overseas Pakistanis in Islamabad—with Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif in attendance—General Munir declared that Pakistan was created on the basis of “every possible difference” between the two religious communities.

“Our religion is different. Our customs are different. Our traditions are different. Our thoughts are different. Our ambitions are different,” Munir said, invoking the ideological foundation laid by Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the 1940s. “You must tell this to your children so that they never forget the story of Pakistan.”

But this “story” is not just about differences—it’s a carefully preserved narrative used by Pakistan’s military establishment to maintain a stranglehold on power, distract the public from economic failures, and perpetuate enmity with India. It is a story that has long come at the cost of regional peace, minority rights, and Pakistan’s own internal harmony.

Munir’s speech, delivered with a religious tone befitting his reputation as a “Hafiz-e-Quran”, did little to hide the Army’s obsession with defining Pakistan solely through what it is not—India. His remarks reflected the establishment’s enduring dependence on the ideological rhetoric of 1947, a time when the wounds of Partition were still fresh, and the world had not yet seen the consequences of such rigid identity politics.

A Doctrine Past Its Expiry Date

The Two-Nation Theory has not aged well. If anything, it collapsed under its own contradictions in 1971, when Bangladesh—originally East Pakistan—broke away in a bloody war that exposed the myth of religious unity. Despite sharing the same religion, East Pakistanis rejected the economic and political dominance of West Pakistan, shattering the illusion that Islam alone could form a cohesive national identity.

And yet, here we are in 2025, with the head of Pakistan’s most powerful institution lecturing overseas citizens to hold tight to that expired ideology. What purpose does this serve, other than reinforcing xenophobia, hostility, and a warped sense of nationalism rooted in exclusion and antagonism?

Critics across the globe have not held back. Indian strategic expert Aditya Raj Kaul accused Munir of “exposing his hate for Hindus and India,” while prominent Pakistani journalist Taha Siddiqui called the remarks an attempt to “brainwash youth” with dangerous falsehoods.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma called the speech a reminder of the stark ideological divide between the two nations, urging India to stop harboring illusions about reconciliation with its western neighbor.

The Real Jugular: The Army’s Grip on Pakistan

Munir’s speech also touched on Pakistan’s usual talking points—Kashmir and Balochistan. His threat-laced comments about Baloch rebels further illustrated how the military sees dissent as terrorism, rather than a call for justice. Kashmir, once again called Pakistan’s “jugular vein,” is less a heartfelt issue and more a strategic tool—one that sustains the military’s budget, influence, and unchallenged supremacy in Pakistan’s political life.

As Delhi-based journalist Rishi Suri rightly pointed out, Kashmir has become more of a “business model” for Pakistan’s generals than a national cause. Strategic analyst Sonam Mahajan summed it up bluntly, “Kashmir is Pakistan’s jugular vein, which explains why Pakistan has been in the ICU for 78 years, sustained only by IMF oxygen and jihadist morphine.”

An Unyielding Establishment in a Changing World

The tragedy of General Munir’s speech is that it wasn’t surprising. It’s the same tired script the Pakistan Army has relied on for decades—where religion is used to unify, enemies are used to justify military supremacy, and history is rewritten to prevent progress.

Pakistan’s establishment had a choice. It could have embraced a narrative of peace, coexistence, and modern statehood. Instead, it chose to double down on identity politics rooted in fear and historical grievances.

By clinging to an outdated and divisive ideology, General Asim Munir and the Pakistan military aren’t just looking backward—they’re actively obstructing the possibility of a forward-looking, inclusive, and stable Pakistan.

And perhaps that is by design. Because in a truly democratic and progressive Pakistan, the Army might no longer be the most powerful voice in the room.