UN must blacklist global terror threat BLA

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, radicalised, and destroyed by an organisation that does not care about Baloch rights; it cares about chaos. That organisation 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 abandon, because the people whose lives it destroys deserve nothing 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 outfit whose leadership sits comfortably abroad while young Baloch men and women die in operations they never fully understood they were joining. The world must designate the BLA and its elite suicide unit, the Majeed Brigade, under the United Nations Security Council's 1267 sanctions regime. The Pakistan-China proposal has not been accepted, the 1267 Committee citing unmet technical thresholds, a determination that, however procedurally grounded, did not occur in a geopolitical vacuum.

"The 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 seventy per cent. It is into this void that the BLA inserts itself with deliberate precision. This is not opportunistic radicalisation. It is the systematic weaponising of deprivation. Recruiters present themselves as champions of Baloch identity, using the language of nationalism to target youth between fifteen and twenty-five. Through encrypted platforms and sophisticated propaganda, they romanticise armed struggle, isolate recruits from family and moderate voices, and condition teenagers to see violence as obligatory. Many who end up as Majeed Brigade suicide operatives entered that pipeline as boys who were told they were freedom fighters. They were not. They were instruments of an organisation whose leadership has never lived in the suffering it exploits. These are not statistics. These are the children of Balochistan, consumed by an organisation that calls itself their liberator.

The scale of violence should alarm every responsible government. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, Baloch insurgent groups carried out 938 attacks in 2024, a fifty-three per cent increase from 2023, with fatalities surging eighty per cent 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 decentralised, networked model that makes it resilient against standard counterterrorism disruption. These are not the numbers of a grievance movement. These are the numbers of an organised terrorist enterprise.

The BLA is not a domestic challenge. It is an instrument of regional destabilisation with documented external sponsorship, including the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian naval officer arrested in Balochistan in 2016, who confessed to financing and organising Baloch militant groups on behalf of Indian intelligence. Growing evidence of tactical cooperation between the BLA and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a transnational jihadist network, further dismantles any argument that this is a local separatist movement with no connection to global terrorism.

"Young Baloch people are not the authors of these attacks. They are the raw material, processed through a pipeline of radicalisation and deployed by leaders who remain safely abroad."

The United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia have each designated the BLA and Majeed Brigade under their own domestic counterterrorism laws. The United States went further, issuing a Foreign Terrorist Organisation 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 listing, free to move across borders, access financial systems, and recruit internationally, is a direct threat to any American commercial or strategic engagement in the region. The gap between America's domestic FTO designation and its position at the UN's 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 severe. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure investment and Balochistan's greatest development opportunity, is a declared BLA target. But this is not merely a Pakistan-China concern. Every attack on a road, port, or energy pipeline is an attack on South Asia's broader economic future and a signal to terrorist organisations worldwide that critical infrastructure can be targeted with impunity. The international community cannot afford to send that signal.

The UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee proposal was not accepted on legal grounds that the regime targets Al Qaeda and ISIL affiliates, and evidence of such affiliation was insufficient. That threshold must be met, and Pakistan is committed to strengthening its evidentiary case. But the broader legal obligation of UNSC Resolution 1373, which requires all member states to deny support to any entity engaged in terrorism, regardless of ideology, has not been suspended. And reports that India played an active diplomatic role in maintaining the hold mean the UN's counterterrorism architecture may have been shaped by regional rivalry rather than by the merits of the threat.

I began where I must end, with the young people of Balochistan. The BLA claims to speak in their name. It does not. It speaks for armed leaders in comfortable exile directing teenagers into suicide operations, and for external actors who view 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 off funding, restricts leadership mobility, and removes the implicit legitimacy the absence of a UN listing currently provides. Every day the world delays, another young person 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 of Pakistan. I will keep asking that question until the answer is yes.

The writer is a senator