Flashpoints | Security | South Asia

Balochistan Is Now Pakistan’s Most Dangerous Province

July was Balochistan’s most violent month this year. It also overtook Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to emerge as Pakistan’s most volatile province.

Screenshot of a Baloch Liberation Army video featuring Bilal Shahwani alias Sahin, of the Majeed Brigade, who carried out the suicide attack on a train at Quetta in Pakistan’s Balochistan province on May 24, 2026.

Balochistan witnessed an unprecedented surge in separatist violence in July: 176 terrorist attacks, involving suicide bombings, complex ambushes, coordinated high-profile assaults and drone operations, were reported that month, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal’s open-source database. In total, the attacks killed 438 people, including 127 security personnel.

July was the most violent month in Balochistan this year, both in terms of attacks and fatalities. The statistics make Balochistan Pakistan’s most volatile province, surpassing Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where 143 violent incidents caused 244 casualties the same month. The data trendlines of terrorist attacks and killings so far in 2026 also reveal that Balochistan has overtaken Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as the most volatile region in the country. As compared to 574 attacks and 1,196 casualties reported in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa between January and July this year, Balochistan witnessed a staggering 765 violent incidents and 1,600 fatalities in the same period.

In addition to the increase in the number of terrorist attacks is the geographic expansion of violence to Balochistan’s Pashtun areas, where Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has been quietly increasing its footprint. The TTP unleashed its firepower on former personnel of the Afghan National Army (ANA), who have been reorganizing and rearming in the province to relaunch the anti-Taliban campaign in Afghanistan. Ironically, ex-ANA factions are using the same residential compounds where once the Taliban’s Quetta shura lived, trained, and launched insurgent campaigns in Afghanistan.

The Afghan Taliban have tasked the TTP to counter the presence of ex-ANA elements in Balochistan’s Pashtun areas. Recent clashes between the TTP and ex-ANA elements have resulted in casualties among Pashtuns in Balochistan, prompting Pashtun tribes in Balochistan to protest, demanding justice and security from the state.

Furthermore, the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP) is also active in the restive province. The group claimed responsibility for the assassination of a judge and his police bodyguard in Mastung district. ISKP has maintained a footprint in Balochistan in one form or the other since 2015. Over the years, ISKP’s influence in Balochistan has ebbed and flowed, amid counterterrorism pressure and aggression from rival militant groups. Meanwhile, ISKP has survived by diversifying its recruitment base, expanding it from Central Asia to Turkiye, keeping its narrative alive through encrypted social media platforms, and leveraging inter-group alliances with like-minded groups in the region, especially Jundullah and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. ISKP, like other terrorist groups, thrives in chaos by exploiting sectarian and sociopolitical faultlines, weakly governed peripheral areas, and soft borders.

So, the surge in violence and killings in Balochistan is the outcome not only of attacks and counterattacks by Baloch separatists and Pakistani security forces but multifaceted militant activity as well. These patterns need to be unpacked against the backdrop of the evolving regional security environment, where internal and external factors together are shaping Balochistan’s security landscape.

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© The Diplomat