The Women at the Front of Balochistan’s Protest Movement

The latest phase of Balochistan’s civic protest movement shows a campaign increasingly carried by women, even as those women become more visible targets of state pressure. Without credible investigations, due process, and political space for peaceful advocacy, coercive responses risk strengthening the very civic infrastructure they are meant to contain, turning documentation, detention, and international scrutiny into a self-sustaining cycle of mobilization.

Over the past two years, the most visible figures in Balochistan’s civic protest movement are increasingly women, leading long marches and sit-ins, speaking on behalf of families with missing members, and occupying space in courtrooms, press clubs and international forums. Dr. Mahrang Baloch, Sabiha Baloch, Sammi Deen Baloch and Fauzia Baloch, all associated with the Baloch Yakjehti Committee’s (BYC) leadership, are among the most prominent, but the pattern runs well beyond a singular name. The BYC (“Yakhjeti” referring to solidarity and unity) is a human rights movement protesting state abuses in Balochistan. The movement was formed in 2020, originally as the Bramsh Yakjehti Committee, in response to the killing of Malik Naz in Dannok village, Turbat, on May 26, 2020, with the incident triggering widespread protests. Following its emergence, the BYC movement came to be associated most prominently with Dr. Baloch’s leadership, though Pakistani state actors have often framed it as being linked to separatist militants and criminal smuggling networks.

Over the spring of 2026, a second pattern emerged. In the accounts compiled by Baloch rights groups, women and their relatives appear not only as organizers, but with growing frequency, as the people being detained. Among them Khadija Baloch, a nursing student whose reported disappearance prompted a month-long sit-in, and Gul Bank, reportedly taken in Kech. In late June the two trends converged, when an anti-terrorism court sentenced Dr. Mahrang Baloch and a fellow organizer to life imprisonment over the death of a paramilitary soldier during a 2025 protest in Gwadar. Taken together, the movement’s leadership patterns and the state’s targeting of its key figures offer a clearer lens through which to understand its evolution.