The Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) has built an ideological case for suicide attacks that differs sharply from the religious justifications used by many militant organisations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Rather than promising an afterlife, the separatist group portrays self-sacrifice as a secular nationalist duty, drawing on the histories of armed independence movements and the writings of military strategists and philosophers. Yet an examination of the BLA’s own publications suggests that this carefully constructed doctrine has done little to restrain its violence against prisoners and other people it regards as obstacles to its campaign.
The distinction is explored in an analysis of two documents produced by the organisation: Tojeel, a 2024 training and indoctrination manual for its suicide wing, the Majeed Brigade, and Dhak, its review of operations published in 2025. Read together, the publications offer insight into how the BLA motivates its fighters, presents itself to supporters and attempts to establish legitimacy. They also expose contradictions between its claims of disciplined, lawful resistance and its own accounts of executions, threats against civilian workers and attacks designed to inflict heavy casualties.
In August 2025, the United States designated the BLA and the Majeed Brigade as foreign terrorist organisations. The group rejected the designation in Dhak, describing itself as an organised military force operating in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and urging Washington to recognise it as a potential ally. Its appeal came as the insurgency expanded its operational reach, including through coordinated attacks, temporary seizures of towns and the March 2025 hijacking of the Jaffar Express passenger train.
The BLA’s present resurgence is rooted in a longstanding dispute over Balochistan’s political status and relationship with Pakistan. Baloch nationalists trace a central grievance to the accession of the princely state of Kalat to Pakistan in March 1948, which they characterise as coercive. The province has supplied natural gas for decades, contains substantial copper and gold reserves and hosts a strategically important section of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, yet remains among Pakistan’s poorest and least developed regions.
The current phase of insurgency, generally dated from the mid-2000s, has increasingly attracted educated, middle-class recruits and incorporated women into militant ranks. The BLA emerged as one of its largest and deadliest organisations, particularly after a 2017 split produced a faction that subsequently developed the Majeed Brigade into its signature weapon. The group’s methods have grown more coordinated since 2024, while its declared ambitions have expanded to include drone and maritime capabilities. Its targeting has also increasingly focused on economic interests, including mining operations and transport routes.
Tojeel provides the ideological foundation for this campaign. Its account of self-sacrifice draws on historical examples ranging from Japanese kamikaze pilots and the Tamil Tigers to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and secular Palestinian organisations. The manual deliberately distances the BLA from Islamist militant groups, including the Taliban, al-Qaida and Hamas, constructing instead a lineage of nationalist resistance in which the nation replaces religion as the object of devotion.
Its language nevertheless borrows heavily from religious traditions. Fallen fighters are described through the vocabulary of sacred pledges, holy bonds and sacrifice, but the manual makes no promise of paradise or divine reward. The purpose of dying, as presented in the text, is to sustain the nation and its struggle for independence. This framing allows the BLA to portray suicide attacks as expressions of political commitment rather than religious obligation.
The manual also invokes Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Sun Tzu and Just War theory to give its doctrine intellectual authority. The analysis, however, identifies significant inconsistencies in these references. Guevara emphasised preserving guerrilla fighters rather than expending them unnecessarily, while Mao regarded guerrilla warfare as part of a broader military strategy. The BLA’s manual, by contrast, elevates deliberate self-sacrifice as an instrument of asymmetric warfare. Its use of philosophical arguments is similarly selective: it draws on existentialist ideas to present death as a meaningful act of freedom, despite important differences between that claim and the views of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.
The contradiction between doctrine and conduct becomes more pronounced in Dhak. The BLA claims to have carried out 521 attacks in 2025, killing more than 1,060 enemy personnel and wounding 556. It also reports killing 75 people it labels “agents” and records 72 of its own fighters as having died, including 11 members of the Majeed Brigade. These figures are the organisation’s own claims, not independently verified totals, but the format of the review is intended to present the BLA as a disciplined, centrally directed military force.
Its account of the Jaffar Express operation, however, undermines its claim to respect the laws of war. The review says the group released women, children, elderly people, sick passengers and other civilians before retaining soldiers as hostages. It then states that 214 captured soldiers were executed after a purported tribunal sentenced them to death and Pakistan declined to negotiate. The analysis notes that Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions prohibits hostage-taking, the killing of captives and executions without the required judicial guarantees. The group’s stated justification does not remove those prohibitions.
Other episodes reveal similar tensions. The BLA says it released captured Levies personnel because they were Baloch, suggesting that ethnicity, rather than their status under the laws of war, influenced its decisions. It also claims to have killed 75 alleged informants or collaborators after proceedings conducted by its own tribunal. Separately, it threatened companies involved in the Saindak and Reko Diq mining projects, warning them to leave Balochistan or face further attacks. Such threats place civilian workers and commercial activity within the conflict.
The Majeed Brigade’s operations also appear to diverge from the manual’s stated preference for exceptional targets beyond the reach of conventional guerrilla warfare. Dhak describes attacks on military convoys in Turbat and Noshki primarily through reported casualty figures, including claims of 47 soldiers killed in one attack and more than 90 in another. The pattern suggests that the suicide wing’s role has increasingly included mass-casualty strikes against troops, rather than being confined to selective operations with a distinct political purpose.
The BLA’s eulogies, by contrast, remain consistent with its secular nationalist message. Tributes to fallen fighters invoke the motherland rather than God, paradise or jihad, and frequently highlight education and political activism as part of recruits’ backgrounds. The publications therefore appear to offer a relatively consistent account of the organisation’s identity, while providing a much less reliable guide to the limits it places on its own violence.
The findings have implications for Pakistan’s counterinsurgency strategy, international counter-messaging and US interests. The analysis argues that an approach dominated by military force and repression risks reinforcing the grievances that the BLA uses to recruit supporters, particularly allegations of enforced disappearances, torture and political marginalisation. It calls for greater political space, accountability and a more equitable stake for Balochistan in projects exploiting the province’s resources.
Counter-messaging efforts, meanwhile, cannot rely primarily on religious arguments against extremism. The BLA’s appeal is rooted in secular nationalism and grievances over governance and resource extraction. A more relevant approach would expose the gap between the group’s professed commitments and its conduct, particularly its treatment of prisoners and alleged collaborators.
Washington also has a direct interest in the conflict. In December 2025, the US Export-Import Bank approved $1.25 billion in financing for the Reko Diq copper-gold mine, which lies within the BLA’s declared target area. As the organisation signals ambitions to expand its capabilities, American-financed projects and associated personnel could face growing risks.
The central finding is that the BLA’s ideology helps explain how it defines itself and motivates its fighters, but does not reliably constrain its actions. Its secular nationalism distinguishes it from jihadist organisations, yet that distinction does not make its methods lawful or its claims of restraint credible. The gap between the identity the BLA promotes and the violence it records remains one of the clearest vulnerabilities in its effort to present itself as a legitimate national liberation movement.
