The Pakistani press described it as an attack on the residence of a politician. This was technically correct in the same way that calling a military bunker a country house would be technically correct.

On July 8, the Majeed Brigade of the Baloch Liberation Army attacked the heavily fortified Khuzdar compound of Shafiqur Rehman Mengal, president of the Jhalawan Panel and a local leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party. A vehicle packed with explosives struck the main entrance, destroying the gate, defensive positions and part of the building. Armed fighters then entered the compound, beginning a battle that continued for more than three hours and involved rockets, grenades and heavy weapons.

Pakistani accounts initially reported at least seventeen people killed, including Mengal’s guards and police personnel, with around thirty wounded. The BLA later claimed a higher toll, alleging that thirty-four members of Mengal’s network had died, including operatives connected to Islamic State Khorasan Province and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Mengal survived. The precise number and affiliations of those killed remain independently unconfirmed. (dawn.com)

But the reason for the attack is less mysterious than the casualty figures.

Shafiq Mengal is not merely another Baloch tribal notable who entered electoral politics. For nearly two decades, Baloch nationalists, human-rights activists and political rivals have identified him as one of the principal commanders of the state-sponsored death-squad system used against the Baloch insurgency and civilian nationalist movements.

He is the son of Naseer Mengal, a former chief minister of Balochistan and federal minister. His family background gave him political protection; his own career supplied the rest. After contacts with criminal and jihadist networks, Mengal emerged during the military rule of Pervez Musharraf as a useful local asset for Pakistan’s security establishment.

In 2008, he established the Musallah Defah Tanzeem, or MDT, ostensibly to defend the region from Baloch separatists. In reality, the organisation became one of the prototypes for the militias now commonly known in Balochistan as death squads: locally recruited, heavily armed groups operating with protection from the security agencies and enjoying broad freedom to abduct, torture, kill, extort and settle private disputes in the name of counterinsurgency.

This was Islamabad’s preferred solution to the political problem in Balochistan. Instead of addressing disappearances, resource extraction, military domination and the denial of political rights, the state outsourced part of its repression to criminal auxiliaries.

The arrangement offered several advantages. Local militias possessed knowledge of families, tribal relationships and nationalist networks that regular soldiers lacked. They could identify activists, intimidate communities and conduct operations that the army and intelligence services could later deny. They could also be dismissed as products of tribal rivalry whenever their crimes became impossible to conceal.

Mengal’s organisation was accused not only of targeting armed separatists but also students, political activists, journalists, religious minorities and personal enemies. His compound and the territory controlled by his men were repeatedly described as a state within the state, containing private detention facilities and torture chambers where abducted people could be interrogated outside every legal process.

The most terrible evidence emerged from Tootak, north of Khuzdar.

In January 2014, human remains were discovered in unmarked graves in an area associated with Mengal’s militia. Initial reports spoke of multiple bodies; Baloch organisations maintained that the real number was far higher. A judicial commission recorded testimony from dozens of witnesses accusing Mengal and his men of responsibility. The commission claimed there was insufficient evidence for prosecution and absolved the army and intelligence agencies, but acknowledged circumstances suggesting Mengal’s possible involvement. He denied the allegations and said he had been made a scapegoat. (The Express Tribune)

The conclusion was a masterpiece of Pakistani judicial choreography. A mass grave had appeared in a territory controlled by a notorious pro-state militia. Witnesses pointed towards its commander. The local administration had permitted a no-go area to exist. Yet the institutions that armed, protected and politically enabled the militia were declared innocent.

Even if one accepted the fiction that the security agencies knew nothing, the question would remain: how does a private army abduct, torture and bury people for years in one of Pakistan’s most militarised provinces without state protection?

The answer is that the death squads were never an accidental by-product of the conflict. They were part of its architecture.

This is why the attack on Mengal’s compound was politically more important than an ordinary strike on a pro-government figure. The BLA was attacking what it considers a central node in the Pakistani counterinsurgency system: a fortified space where tribal power, organised crime, jihadist militancy, electoral politics and military intelligence allegedly converge.

Mengal’s network also illustrates the strange ecosystem through which Pakistan has governed Balochistan. The state publicly claims to be fighting terrorism while repeatedly cultivating Islamist organisations useful against secular Baloch nationalism. Religious militancy has been tolerated, redirected and occasionally weaponised against political forces demanding autonomy or independence.

Mengal’s historical links to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Deobandi militant circles are well documented in specialist reporting. More recent allegations go further. Baloch sources and regional analysts claim that the Pakistani establishment has entrusted him with coordinating or facilitating an ISIS-K infrastructure in Balochistan, particularly as the group expands attacks against Baloch nationalists, the Balochistan National Party and religious minorities.

These allegations have not been established in a court and should not be presented as judicial fact. But they cannot simply be dismissed. ISIS-K’s targets in Balochistan increasingly overlap with the enemies of the Pakistani security establishment: secular nationalists, supporters of Akhtar Mengal, Baloch civil-rights organisations and communities regarded as religiously deviant by Sunni extremists.

In September 2025, an attack outside a BNP-M rally in Quetta killed fifteen people. ISIS-K claimed responsibility. The group has denounced Baloch nationalism as un-Islamic, threatened the Baloch Yakjehti Committee and called for violence against the Zikri community. It has also declared open hostility towards the BLA and BLF. (Eurasia Review)

This convergence does not by itself prove that ISIS-K is controlled by Pakistan. Militant groups possess their own ideology, leadership and objectives. But Pakistan’s long record of using jihadist organisations as instruments of domestic and regional policy makes suspicion inevitable, particularly when figures already associated with military-backed militias appear at the intersection of these networks.

The BLA claimed that ISIS-K and Lashkar-e-Taiba members were present inside Mengal’s compound when it attacked. That claim remains unverified. Yet the compound was plainly more than an ordinary politician’s home. Its fortifications, armed guards and ability to sustain a prolonged battle demonstrated the status of a militia headquarters protected within a provincial capital.

Pakistan will portray the assault exclusively as terrorism. The BLA used a suicide vehicle, heavy weapons and an urban commando operation that inevitably exposed civilians to grave danger. Nothing in Mengal’s record removes the obligation to examine the methods used against him.

But describing the target merely as the residence of a PPP leader erases the political history that made the attack possible.

Shafiq Mengal represents the system Pakistan created when it decided that Balochistan could be governed through disappearances, proxies, private prisons and unaccountable violence. The state gave local strongmen weapons and immunity, permitted them to create private territories and then dressed them in electoral legitimacy.

When the mass graves were discovered, nobody important was punished. When families demanded their missing relatives, they were threatened. When activists named the death squads, the state called them propagandists. Mengal survived every accusation and eventually re-emerged as a respectable political figure.

The attack in Khuzdar was therefore not simply an episode in the war between the BLA and Islamabad. It was an attack on the machinery beneath Pakistan’s official counterterrorism narrative.

The state claims to be fighting militancy in Balochistan. For years, however, it has governed through militants of its own.

Shafiq Mengal is not an aberration in that system. He is one of its most perfect creations.