By Uzma Ehtasham
The testimony of Adeela Baloch, the young nurse accused of planning a suicide attack on behalf of the Baloch Liberation Army, did more than puncture the carefully crafted mythology of an insurgent movement. It forced a reckoning with the darker, hidden economies of coercion that have long sat beneath the rhetoric of resistance in Balochistan. When she spoke publicly last year, first in an interview with Al-Nahar TV and later in a strikingly long and uneasy press conference, she offered a narrative that felt at odds with the heroic portraits militants prefer to paint of themselves. Here was a woman trained to save lives through the WHO’s polio program, suddenly thrust into a world where her identity, her safety and even her body became bargaining chips in a conflict she never sought to enter.
From her earliest encounters with the BLA’s facilitators, Adeela described being drawn in by a familiar vocabulary of cultural pride and political grievance. Many young Baloch, especially those working in remote districts, hear these refrains often, usually presented as the beginning of a political awakening. But what she said followed in her case was something far more brutal. According to her account, that initial language of empowerment quickly dissolved into intimidation. She described being taken to a remote mountain camp where the men who had approached her as comrades subjected her to repeated sexual assault. The violence was filmed, she said, and the footage became leverage. The threat was simple: wear the suicide vest when instructed, or watch your life collapse under the weight of public humiliation.
The detail of her allegations, however disturbing, spoke to something larger than her own ordeal. She claimed there were other women and girls held in similar captivity, many of them recruited through the same appeals to identity, only to be trapped in cycles of rape, addiction and psychological manipulation. Some, she said, had been forcibly dosed with drugs to dull resistance; others were coerced with threats against their families. None, she insisted, were the “voluntary martyrs” repeatedly showcased in the group’s propaganda videos. The image of the fearless female fighter, the one that militants have used for years to symbolise the evolution of their movement, was, in her telling, a performance crafted to conceal the systemic abuse behind the scenes.
Her decision to name senior figures, including Mahrang Baloch, was one of the most striking elements of her testimony. She spoke without theatrics or defiance, but with a kind of exhausted clarity, as though she had long run out of ways to survive the burden of silence. She appealed directly to Baloch families, urging them to guard their daughters against those who wrapped exploitation in the language of national struggle. In a moment that cut through much of the political noise surrounding her case, she said that she believed she had survived only because “God saved me”, and that speaking publicly felt like her final obligation to women who might otherwise be swallowed by the same machinery of coercion.
The press conference itself — nearly two hours of questions, narration and pauses that revealed the emotional cost of recounting such memories — offered a portrait of a militant ecosystem utterly removed from the polished aesthetic of its public messaging. What she described was not a rebel movement grounded in discipline and ideology, but a network where power was asserted through fear, where sexual violence was a method of recruitment, and where women’s bodies became both tools of propaganda and instruments of war. Adeela called it a “factory of death”, one that operated with the deliberate intention of transforming the most vulnerable members of her community into expendable assets.
Her allegations extended to one of the movement’s most recognizable figures, Allah Nazar, whom she accused of directing the transfer of women to remote encampments. She said he oversaw the environment of forced drug use and psychological manipulation, including staged raids in which men dressed in military uniforms assaulted women. The purpose of these mock attacks, she claimed, was to instil hatred and confusion, persuading the women that the state itself was their tormentor and that the only path to dignity was through an explosion that would take their own life along with others.
In stepping forward, Adeela did more than accuse individual commanders. She challenged an entire mythology. She placed the burden back on society — on families, activists, political leaders and observers who have been willing to romanticize the movement’s slogans without examining the reality underneath. Her story is not an easy one to hear, nor is it convenient for those who view the conflict solely through the lens of center-periphery tensions. But to ignore her would be to allow the cycle she described to continue, hidden once more behind the familiar words of sacrifice and honor. Her final question, delivered quietly and without drama, still hangs in the air: if this is what happened to the women we never heard about, then how many more remain unheard? It is a question that demands answers not just from militants, but from anyone who has looked away.
(The writer is a public health professional, journalist, and possesses expertise in health communication, having keen interest in national and international affairs, can be reached at uzma@metro-morning.com)
