There is an image the Balochistan Liberation Army wants the world to see: a woman in militant fatigues, renamed as resistance and pushed across sympathetic media feeds.
There is another image that it fears more. A nurse sitting before cameras in Quetta, saying she had been misled, trapped and blackmailed. A teenage girl stopped on a bus before she could meet a handler. A law student, a teacher, a health worker, a daughter, a mother; each removed from the ordinary protections of family and community and delivered into the machinery of terror.
Between these two images lies the truth of BLA’s latest doctrine. It is not a war for Baloch women. It is a war on them.
For years, the BLA and its media ecosystem have tried to sell a carefully polished story to the outside world. In that story, Baloch women appear as liberated fighters, breaking patriarchal barriers, joining a cause greater than themselves and exercising agency in a conflict otherwise dominated by men. It borrows the language of feminism to conceal the oldest form of exploitation: isolate a woman, break her support system, manipulate her honour, threaten her future, then call her death empowerment.
Before this new phase of urban propaganda and digital recruitment, Baloch women were not the face of suicide violence.
The old Baloch insurgency was brutal enough. It killed labourers, travellers, teachers, security personnel, Chinese workers and ordinary civilians whose only crime was to be present on a road, in a market, at a school, or on a train that terrorists had decided to turn into a battlefield. But the systematic use of women as suicide attackers marks something darker than tactical adaptation. It is psychological warfare, cultural vandalism and gendered coercion dressed up as politics.
Before this new phase of urban propaganda and digital recruitment, Baloch women were not the face of suicide violence. Since Shari Baloch’s 2022 attack at Karachi University, however, women have increasingly appeared in BLA and allied militant narratives, not merely as participants but as symbols.
The terrorist understands the value of shock. A female bomber gives him more than casualties. She gives him novelty. She gives him media attention. Reuters has reported that women’s growing visibility in BLA operations has become part of the insurgents’ propaganda and recruitment value. That is precisely why the world must not consume this theatre uncritically.
The BLA calls her a martyr, as Adeela Baloch calls herself a victim.
Her case should be placed at the centre of Pakistan’s international argument. Adeela, identified in public reports as a nurse from Turbat and a health worker, appeared at a government-organised press conference in September 2024. She said she had been “misguided by terrorists”. She said young people were being lured with false promises. She thanked the state for saving her. Most importantly, she offered the line that should travel further than any BLA poster: “The idea that Baloch women willingly become suicide bombers is a complete lie. Terrorists seduce Baloch women by blackmail, which I am an eyewitness.”
Her account sits inside a wider pattern of online grooming, emotional manipulation and alleged blackmail that Pakistani investigators and victims’ families have repeatedly described.
Sexual coercion, psychological pressure and blackmail must be investigated as instruments of recruitment, not treated as side issues. In an honour-based society, the threat of exposure is not a private embarrassment. It can be a social death sentence. Where explicit material, emotional grooming or threats to family honour are allegedly used to compel women into militancy, the matter is no longer simply terrorism. It is gendered violence.
In December 2025, police said they detained a school-age girl travelling from Balochistan to Karachi to meet a handler after months of online contact with BLA militants. She was not charged. Sindh’s home minister said she would be placed under state protection as “a victim rather than a suspect.” Police said the girl had been manipulated through Facebook and Instagram and convinced that an attack would bring her honour and recognition.
The use of a teenage girl in an alleged suicide plot should trigger every child-protection alarm in the international system. Whether the grooming takes place through family networks, militant households, closed propaganda circles or online handlers, the principle is the same.
BLA’s programme would be weaker without TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Rumble and encrypted messaging. It is built through reels, songs, grievance clips, martyrdom posters, edited battlefield videos and private messages that slowly convert alienation into obedience.
GNET has documented how the BLA and Hakkal Media use online platforms to disseminate propaganda, bypass traditional media gatekeepers, sustain public attention around operations and create virality around female fighters.
The United States designated the Balochistan Liberation Army and its alias, the Majeed Brigade, as Foreign Terrorist Organisations in August 2025. That designation should have consequences. Platforms cannot claim to be helpless when the ecosystem is visible, branded and operational.
Indian media has repeatedly served as the international amplifier of BLA’s women-as-resistance narrative. When a BLA operation takes place, there are usually two attacks. The first is physical. The second is narrative. BLA-linked media releases images, videos and biographies are packaged by Indian television and digital outlets for wider consumption, often with language that sanitises coercion and foregrounds spectacle: “women fidayeen,” “educated rebels,” “Gen Z fighters,” “resistance icons.”
India, however, cannot have two positions at once. It cannot chair the BRICS Counter Terrorism Working Group in New Delhi, speak the language of zero tolerance, discuss radicalisation and new technologies, and then allow its media ecosystem to glamorise a designated terrorist group’s exploitation of Pakistani women.
Pakistan’s task, however, cannot end with denunciation. It must build a disciplined strategic communications campaign around living witnesses, digital evidence, rehabilitation stories and legal documentation. The strongest answer to BLA propaganda is not a louder slogan. It is a survivor protected with dignity. A mother’s testimony. A rescued girl’s education resumed. A nurse’s warning. A forensic trail from platform to handler. A dossier placed before the UN, the OIC, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, and every capital that still confuses BLA media output with political expression.
The writer is a freelance columnist.