Baloch women fighters played a key role in the BLA’s recent coordinated attacks across Balochistan. The involvement of women in the Baloch armed movement is part of the broader trend. After peaceful protests over enforced disappearances and exploitations failed, with men jailed or killed, the once-silent Baloch women are picking up arms, and even turning suicide bombers.
All through the night last Friday and into the weekend, Baloch rebels upped the ante against the Pakistani establishment. At least 10 security personnel were killed in coordinated attacks targeting security forces, police, and civilian infrastructure across 12 locations in Balochistan. The province’s chief minister, Sarfaraz Bugti, was visibly shaken and in tears. What stood out most for many in the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA)’s attacks was the release of images of two of the attackers. Both of them were women, screamed news headlines. That raises a larger question. Militancy and armed resistance have long been seen as a male preserve, where men dangled AK-47s and blew themselves up in suicide attacks. How then did Baloch women come to take up arms?
Why is the Baloch resistance no longer the age-old male-dominated tribal rebellion it once was? In a nutshell, the answer is the brutal repression of the Pakistani military establishment on the Baloch community. Analysts point to a mix of factors like, changing times, Pakistani mistreatment of its largest province, rage, despair, and strategic adaptation.
“It’s important to look at what it means when women become part of an insurgency”, according to Pakistani political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa.
It is also the story of women pushed to the brink after the forced disappearances of their men by the Pakistani military apparatus and joint economic exploitation of Balochistan by the Pakistanis and the Chinese.
TWO WOMEN SUICIDE ATTACKERS RATTLE PAK, ONE WOMAN JOINED BLA ON HER BIRTHDAY
After the days-long attacks that left 50 civilians and 17 security personnel dead, the BLA released images of two of its attackers. Both were women, one of them identified as 24-year-old Asifa Mengal. Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif also acknowledged that two of the attacks involved female rebels.
Asifa Mengal joined the BLA’s Majeed Brigade on her 21st birthday. According to the BLA’s statement, she decided to become a fidayee in January 2024 and was the attacker who targeted the ISI headquarters in Nushki on Saturday.
Soon after, a video of a BLA woman fighter went viral on social media. It showed her carefully manoeuvring around a Pakistani security forces’ building before unleashing several shots. Armed with a heavy gun, she was seen laughing with her male BLA colleagues as they mocked the Pakistani government, claiming it was incapable of confronting the Baloch outfit. Throughout the video, she smiled and offered her justification for taking up arms.
Minutes later, she quietly moved towards a corner as gunfire echoed around her. Then she opened fire again.
While women like Mahrang Baloch, and journalist Shammi Deen Baloch have formed civil society movements to promote dialogue, hundreds of women in Balochistan are joining the BLA and opting to become suicide bombers for the cause of liberation. Mahrang Baloch, for the record, has been in jail since March 2025, arrested from a peaceful sit-in protest in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province.
PATTERN OF BALOCH WOMEN TAKING UP ARMS HAS BEEN A TREND FOR YEARS
However, this is not the first instance of women BLA fighters coming into the limelight. Women from the Baloch ethnic minority are increasingly turning into suicide bombers, shaking Pakistan’s security interests and security apparatus. The involvement of a Baloch women suicide bomber first came to light with the 2022 Karachi University bombing.
In April 2022, Shari Baloch, a 30-year-old mother of two with a master’s degree, detonated herself outside the Confucius Institute at the University of Karachi. The attack killed three Chinese nationals and a Pakistani driver. Four others were injured.
In June 2022, Sumaiya Qalandrani Baloch, a journalist and the fiancee of Rehan Baloch, the BLA’s first male suicide bomber, carried out a fidayeen attack targeting a Pakistani military convoy in Balochistan’s Turbat. Rehan died in a suicide attack in 2018.
A week before the hijacking of the Jaffar Express on March 2, 2025, a woman identified as Banuk Mahikan Baloch targeted a Frontier Corps patrol vehicle in Balochistan’s Kalat, killing one person and injuring three security personnel. Science graduate Banuk Mahikan Baloch joined the BLA’s Majeed Brigade four years ago.
WHY ARE BALOCH WOMEN JOINING BLA, ARMED RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS?
As the Baloch liberation movement grew over the years, it shifted from being led by tribal chiefs to drawing momentum from the educated middle class. This is also evident from the diverse professional backgrounds of the female fighters.
Pakistan’s response to the Baloch resistance is iron-fisted, with enforced disappearances of activists becoming the norm, having made dissent rare. The Voice for Baloch Missing Persons in 2025 estimated over 5,000 individuals, mostly men, have vanished since 2000, leaving families shattered.
But with the men locked up, women emerged at the forefront of the Baloch resistance. Educated and professional, but scarred by personal grief and trauma, they have taken a stand in both violent and non-violent ways.
“It’s important to look at what it means when women become part of an insurgency. Women turn into active participants in violence when disappointment deepens into desperation… This happens after families upon families have suffered. Sisters, wives, daughters and mothers who have lost their loved ones, with no recourse to justice. When grief is met only with silence and impunity, that accumulated suffering pushes people towards violence,” Pakistani political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa, a senior research fellow at King’s College London told Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera on Monday.
The wife of the founder of the Majeed Brigade, Aslam Baloch, Yasmeen, had in a 2019 interview urged women to join the movement. She believed that the social barriers in Balochistan’s patriarchal society needed to be broken and emphasised that freedom could not be achieved without women’s participation.
Unlike groups such as Hamas or the Houthis, which have religious hierarchies and patriarchal social structures that confine women to support roles, the Baloch armed movement draws from a largely secular, ethno-nationalist principle. This has allowed women, even from educated and urban backgrounds, to be fighters and suicide attackers.
WHY ROLE OF WOMEN BALOCH FIGHTERS BECOMING IMPORTANT?
Strategic affairs expert Brahma Chellaney in 2025 described it as a clear result of the “desperation and frustration among the Baloch people”.
While the focus of the Pakistani security forces tends to be on young Baloch men, Brahma Chellaney earlier told, “The role of female suicide bombers is becoming important, especially to inflict maximum damage and generate widespread fear, because it’s very difficult to control female suicide bombers”.
“This is the only way the Baloch Liberation Army and other pro-militant groups have been able to target Chinese interests. To do so, they must rely on increasingly sophisticated methods,” Brahma Chellaney told.
However, experts close to the Pakistani establishment argue that the rise of women in BLA attacks is less about empowerment and more about exploitation. They claim the group systematically targets young, educated Baloch women, grooming or coercing them through propaganda, personal grievances, emotional manipulation and, in some cases, blackmail.
Expert of strategic affairs Michael Kugelman wrote on X that the Balochistan crisis was a result of Pakistan’s “policy failures, because the real question is why are there so many fighters to start with”. He argued that the BLA had “exploited local anger at the state, boosting recruitment and getting stronger”.
The suicide bombings by Baloch rebels have claimed at least 350 lives in Pakistan since 2011, with approximately 15 of those specifically attributed to attacks by Baloch women suicide bombers. With the Pakistani Army engaged in a multi-front war, including its battle against the Pakistani Taliban in neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, its capabilities have been severely stretched.
The Baloch militancy has severely hit the Pakistan Army, with the Islamabad-based Centre for Research and Security Studies reporting 685 Pakistani security personnel killed in 2024 alone. Pakistan witnessed its deadliest year in more than a decade in 2025, as conflict-related deaths jumped by 74% compared to the previous year, according to data released by the Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS).
Therefore, Pakistan and its establishment are suffering one blow after another without much success in preventing them. And at this very juncture, more Baloch women are joining in as fighters and suicide bombers to liberate their “motherland”, Balochistan.
