On 21 August 2026, FAH terrorists struck the Geet area of Khad Kocha, Mastung, in a drone attack that killed four people and injured three others. The target was not a military installation or a security post. It was an orchard. Labourers going about ordinary agricultural work were struck while earning an honest living, in an area already under curfew since late July following repeated attacks on the common man earning livelihood.
Among the injured are Ali Raza Mengal of Khad Kocha, along with Naseebullah Abro and Khalid Hussain, both residents of Haji Shehar, Kachhi. None were combatants. They were local workers supporting their families through lawful labour in the fields. Their deaths have left households without breadwinners, again exposing the human cost of FAH’s terrorism.
This is not an isolated incident. It is part of a deliberate pattern. FAH terrorists have repeatedly targeted labourers across Balochistan: miners, construction workers, and other civilians engaged in lawful employment. On 11 August 2026, four labourers were abducted from a chromite mine near Chagai. Days earlier, on 1 August, three Sindhi labourers were abducted in Basima, Washuk. In Turbat, six labourers were reportedly abducted and killed. Construction workers have been targeted in Khuzdar. The list keeps growing, and the pattern is unmistakable.
The logic behind this campaign is not military. It is economic and psychological. Labourers are undefended, mobile, and economically indispensable. Striking them accomplishes several goals at once: it deters investment and outside labour from entering contested areas, it punishes communities seen as tolerating state presence or development projects, and it generates fear at minimal operational cost, since orchards, mines, and construction sites lack the security apparatus of military convoys or checkpoints. Where an attack on a security escort invites retaliation and scrutiny, an attack on unarmed workers achieves disruption with far lower risk to the attackers.
This is why the violence keeps migrating across sectors, agriculture, mining, construction, rather than concentrating on any single industry. The common denominator is not the sector but the vulnerability: civilians with no means of defending themselves, doing work that sustains local economies and, by extension, the state’s development agenda in the province.
The consequences ripple outward. Every attack on labourers raises the risk premium for employers, discourages outside workers from taking jobs in Balochistan, and slows the very infrastructure and resource projects that could create long term employment for local communities. In this sense, the campaign is self-defeating for the province it claims to speak for. It deepens the underdevelopment and unemployment that fuels grievance in the first place, rather than addressing it.
Targeting workers is a direct attack on civilians, on livelihoods, and on Balochistan’s future. The people of the province want peace, stability, employment, and development, not a cycle where every economic opportunity becomes a potential target. They reject violence that steals breadwinners from their families and seeks to paralyze honest economic life. Terrorism has not derailed Balochistan’s progress before, and it will not do so now. Those who systematically target innocent labourers will be identified and held accountable under the law. The province’s future will be shaped by those who build it, its farmers, miners, and workers, not by those who seek to destroy what they build.
