attacks in Gwadar
The BLF called its offensive “Operation Almas”. On October 23, it announced that the operation had ended after its fighters held the Frontier Works Organisation’s camp at Gwadar Zero Point for twenty hours. It claimed to have targeted military and intelligence facilities inside the compound, inflicted heavy casualties and carried out related attacks around Gwadar and Gabd. The group acknowledged seven of its own fighters killed, including a woman identified as Bilqees Didag, alias Almas.
Pakistan’s military gave a sharply different account: ten attackers killed, including a woman, one civilian dead and no losses among security personnel. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi initially described a foiled attack on an unoccupied construction camp. Neither the BLF’s casualty claims nor its account of prolonged control has been independently established.
Even without accepting the insurgents’ version, however, the choice of targets deserves attention. The BLF presented the FWO compound as an instrument of military and economic control. In Gwadar, the centrepiece of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’s maritime ambitions, an attack on the infrastructure of construction also challenges the state’s claim that its development programme can proceed securely. The military itself supplied the connection when it accused the attackers of obstructing development and prosperity. The unresolved question is whose authority defines those terms.
Further east, the Baloch Republican Guards have been pursuing a less spectacular campaign against the same broader system of control. Railway tracks, power transmission towers, gas pipelines, government offices and military convoys recur in the group’s statements. The geographical spread and repetition matter more than any individual explosion. These attacks seek to interrupt the movement of troops, resources and commerce while demonstrating that the state cannot guarantee their passage.
On September 27, the BRG said its fighters established checkpoints on the highway between Sibi and Bakhtiar Abad. Its statement reported that no security personnel or government officials were encountered and no vehicles carrying Balochistan’s mineral resources towards Punjab passed through during the searches. As a military result, this was modest. As a political declaration, it was explicit: the group claimed the right to inspect movement through Baloch territory and to challenge the outward flow of its resources.
A day later, it claimed a railway bombing near Gulab Larho in Naseerabad that disrupted train services. On October 4, it was reported to have destroyed two electricity transmission towers at Katpar Sharif in Sibi district; on October 5, it claimed bomb attacks damaging railway tracks at two locations in the Limji area. The campaign combines attacks on armed personnel with repeated disruption of the infrastructure through which the province is connected to the rest of Pakistan.
Such disruption also affects the people the insurgents claim to represent. Electricity lines and railways serve civilian communities as well as the state. Damaging them can impose hardship on residents already deprived of reliable services. That cost belongs in any assessment of the insurgency’s methods. It also exposes the struggle over infrastructure itself: Islamabad presents connectivity as evidence of integration and development; the insurgents treat parts of that network as instruments of extraction and military access.
The BRG’s reported activity has also become more ambitious. On July 29, it claimed to have killed ten security personnel in two attacks on military convoys in Kachhi district. On September 4, it claimed a coordinated assault in Bagh, also in Kachhi, involving a security camp, police facilities and administrative buildings, with five security personnel killed. On September 30, it claimed another five deaths in a convoy ambush near Dhadar and Sanni Road, together with the destruction of a surveillance quadcopter.
These remain attributed accounts, rather than an independently audited record of military losses. Nevertheless, they indicate an effort to move beyond isolated sabotage towards operations that combine attacks on security forces with temporary challenges to local administration. Striking police stations, identity-registration facilities and government offices contests the state’s presence in several forms at once.
The South Asia Terrorism Portal’s partial database recorded at least twenty-three security-force deaths in six BRG-linked incidents by October 18, compared with seven deaths in four incidents throughout 2025. The BRG’s own figures are much higher: it claimed seventy-three operations in the first half of 2026, including twenty-four attacks on security forces, police and alleged state-backed operatives, and thirty-nine personnel killed.
Those datasets cannot be treated as interchangeable. The group’s catalogue includes sabotage and roadblocks alongside lethal attacks; the monitoring database is explicitly partial. The discrepancy establishes neither that every insurgent claim is true nor that the smaller database captures the full campaign. What the supplied record supports is a widening range of targets and several reported attacks with higher losses than previously recorded for the group.
Nor does the BRG operate in complete organisational isolation. It belongs to the history of cooperation embodied by Baloch Raaji Ajoi Sangar, the BRAS coalition, publicly announced in 2018 and bringing together major Baloch armed organisations. Their shared agenda has included attacks on Pakistani forces, Chinese interests and CPEC-linked projects. Pakistan proscribed BRAS in 2019. The subsequent persistence of attacks illustrates the limits of a designation when the networks, local grievances and capacity for violence remain.
The BRG’s activity around Sibi, Kachhi and Naseerabad and the BLF’s operation in coastal Gwadar should not be collapsed into a single centrally directed offensive. Membership of an alliance does not prove joint command of a particular attack. What can be identified is a convergence of targets: security installations, administrative institutions and the infrastructure connecting resource-rich territory to military and commercial power.
That convergence has a political context which Islamabad’s preferred vocabulary largely removes. Enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and impunity have helped sustain Baloch alienation from the state. These grievances also animate peaceful activism, which cannot honestly be treated as an extension of armed organisations.
In May, Amnesty International documented the disappearance from Karachi of Dad Shah, brother of human rights defender Fozia Baloch. It reported that officials allegedly belonging to the Counter Terrorism Department had taken him from his home, while relatives seeking answers faced harassment and arbitrary detention. A state confronting an insurgency still has to explain why the brother of a rights activist disappears instead of being brought before a court.
The distinction matters strategically as well as morally. When peaceful demands for information about missing relatives produce intimidation, the state weakens the credibility of the lawful channels through which grievances might be addressed. Armed groups can then point to that failure as evidence for their own argument that political engagement offers no remedy. Repression does not mechanically turn every victim into an insurgent. It does make the promise of equal citizenship increasingly difficult to defend.
The official response to Gwadar again placed external sponsorship at the centre of the explanation, describing the attackers as Indian-backed. An allegation of foreign assistance requires evidence; repeating it in the name assigned to an adversary does not provide that evidence. Even where external involvement can be established, it cannot explain away the domestic conditions that make an insurgency durable.
There are clear limits to what these operations demonstrate. A roadblock does not amount to permanent territorial control. A raid on government buildings does not establish an alternative administration. The BLF’s claim to have held a compound for twenty hours, even if substantiated, would not mean it could govern Gwadar. Pakistan retains overwhelming military advantages, and insurgent announcements offer no reliable timetable for changing that balance.
But the state’s declared restoration of order after each attack is an equally inadequate measure of political success. Reopening a railway line or clearing a compound restores a function. It does not resolve the conflict over who benefits from that function, who controls it and what happens to those who object.
From the BRG’s railway sabotage in the east to the BLF’s assault in Gwadar, the insurgency is seeking to make Pakistan’s control of Balochistan more expensive and less predictable. Islamabad can repair the tracks, replace the pylons and reinforce the camps. Its harder task is to explain why the infrastructure advertised as the province’s future remains inseparable from a security system so many Baloch experience as a threat.
