Photo collage depicting people associated with Balochistan amid concerns over alleged human rights violations in the region. (Image Source: Human Rights Council of Balochistan)
The Human Rights Council of Balochistan (HRCB) has released a report alleging a significant deterioration in the human rights situation across Balochistan during 2025. It has cited increases in enforced disappearances, killings and restrictions on civil liberties, with peaceful protests being branded terrorism and punishing activists.
Titled “Balochistan: The State of Human Rights in 2025”, the report documents alleged human rights violations recorded throughout the year. It attributes many of the incidents to Pakistani security forces, intelligence agencies and state-backed armed groups.
According to HRCB, 1,482 cases of enforced disappearances were documented in 2025, representing a 79 per cent increase compared to the previous year. The organisation said 108 minors were among those reported missing. The report also recorded 598 killings during the year, which it said marked an increase of approximately 25 per cent compared to 2024. Among those killed were 29 minors, according to the findings.
The way things are escalating this year, in 2026, it is likely that all curbs have been removed from the personnel of the Pakistani security forces as far as dealing with civilians is concerned. This has already led to thousands of enforced disappearances and wanton killings by them, according to a report of The Balochistan Post.
The HRCB alleged that Pakistani security forces and state-backed armed groups were responsible for 325 of the recorded killings, accounting for more than half of the total cases documented by the organisation. The report identified the Frontier Corps (FC) as the agency most frequently named in cases documented by HRCB, alleging its involvement in 897 enforced disappearances and 195 killings during the reporting period.
In addition to documenting disappearances and killings, the report states that journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders and peaceful protesters faced legal harassment, arbitrary detention and physical violence during 2025.
According to HRCB, the reported violations occurred amid large-scale military operations, communication blackouts and restrictions on freedom of assembly. Besides, the use of counter-terrorism legislation against political activists and humanitarian workers also grew.
The Human Rights Council of Balochistan describes itself as a non-profit and non-partisan human rights organisation based in Balochistan and Sweden.
Pakistani authorities have repeatedly rejected allegations of systematic human rights abuses and enforced disappearances. They claim that security operations in Balochistan are conducted in accordance with the law and are aimed at countering militancy and maintaining public order.
While the uniformed forces like police and the Army strike on the ground, the Military Intelligence (MI) and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) run a pervasive network of digital and human surveillance that chokes Baloch society. The MI operates with unchecked authority, mapping out local lineage trees to track down relatives of activists, orchestrating midnight house raids, and maintaining their own unacknowledged underground black sites.
Simultaneously, the IB weaponises institutional data, wiretapping telephone lines and monitoring social media to identify potential intellectual threats before they even step onto a university campus. Their reach extends far beyond Balochistan’s borders into surrounding provinces like Sindh and Punjab, tracking, profiling and hunting down displaced Baloch students and refugees who fled their burning villages in search of safety.
In fact, Karachi remains a very difficult place for the Baloch people as enforced disappearances of students, teachers and activists are now happening on a regular basis.
The Frontier Corps (FC) acts as the frontline colonial overseer, running illegal checkpoints that function as extortion and abduction hubs. It is notorious for the illegalities its personnel commit openly. Besides FC, the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) operates as a legalised death squad.
When the military suffers losses in the mountains, the CTD routinely pulls previously abducted Baloch civilians from secret dungeons, executes them in cold blood, dumps their bodies and releases press statements claiming they killed terrorists in a shootout. These staged encounters are a pathetic attempt to cover up military incompetence and serve to mask the state’s institutionalised illegal mechanism.
Thousands of the brightest minds of Baloch society, in the vanguard of intellectual resistance, have been forcibly disappeared. Independent data collected by organisations like “Paank” confirms a terrifying escalation, with thousands of verified enforced disappearances and hundreds of extrajudicial killings recorded in 2025. The momentum of state terror shows no signs of slowing down.
In 2026 too, in the initial months, the pattern of enforced disappearances is systematically weaponised in strategic conflict zones like Kech, Quetta and Gwadar. Students, professors, poets and doctors are dragged from their homes in the dead of night by masked men in military uniforms. In secret torture cells, they endure unspeakable physical and psychological savagery. For many, their fate is sealed when their mutilated, chemically burned bodies are dumped in desolate areas or buried in unmarked mass graves, a signature tactic meant to terrorise the Baloch collective consciousness.
Apparently, after recognising that Pakistani uniformed soldiers are despised and vulnerable, the military leadership has outsourced local butchery to criminal proxies. These state-backed death squads, comprised of drug traffickers and local mercenaries, are granted total immunity by the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and MI. In exchange, they act as shadow eyes and executioners, hunting down political activists, raiding homes with hand grenades.
These death squads also target independent journalists like “Asif Khan Khetran” or the late Sajid Hussain Baloch, doctors, engineers, educators, labourers, and students. Even in the death of poets like the recent targeted killing of Martyred Prof. “Ghamkhwar Hayat”, these death squads are involved. They were also responsible for the second abduction of prominent Balochi female poet “Habiba Peerjan” to enforce an absolute war on truth.
What the generals in Rawalpindi, however hard they may try to snuff out dissent, fail to comprehend is that their escalating brutality is the ultimate proof of their strategic defeat. When an oppressor resorts to unbridled violence against the population, it accelerates its own ideological decay. That is what is happening with Pakistani authorities, its Army, the police and other such organisations.
Every time the Pakistani military disappears a student, every time they dump a mutilated body and every time their proxy death squads strike, they do not suppress the insurgency; they legitimise it. They turn every grieving mother into a revolutionary leader and every young Baloch into a potential fighter.
