Ever since the launch of CPEC, India has been conducting regular and systematic campaigns against Pakistan. RAW-funded terrorists attacked the Chinese Consulate in Karachi in November 2018, followed by an attack on a hotel in Gwadar. In August 2018, a bus carrying Chinese engineers was attacked by terrorists in Chaghi. Attempt to attack Pakistan Stock Exchange building in Karachi. However, the police and guards in time saved all the terrorists from hell by inflicting heavy losses. In all these attacks, the face of BLA was in front but behind it as BLA was against the Chinese investment in Pakistan that it would not benefit the locals.
The recent attack on Chinese nationals at Karachi University has raised many questions. The bomb blast in Lahore and Anarkali a few months ago had not yet faded from the minds of the people and terror was spreading in Karachi as well. The recent fabric of terrorism seems to be linked to the unrest in Balochistan, it has also become necessary to determine where the fabric of the parties claiming responsibility for terrorism can be found. As outlawed Baloch Liberation Army (Foreign-Funded) claimed responsibility of the attack and declare this attack as the first effort to use a female suicide bomber, however, it is not the first extremist organization to do so. Extremist groups have previously used female suicide bombers to carry out terrorist acts in Pakistan.
About 22 years ago, on November 6, 2000, a bomb attack on the Karachi office of Nawa-e-Waqt, one of Pakistan’s leading Urdu newspapers, was described as the “first suicide attack” in Karachi and a woman did. The attack killed four people, including the alleged “attacker” and three employees of Nawa-e-Waqt, and injured six others, including two employees. A similar example was found in 2005 when security forces arrested two sisters, Arifah Baloch and Saba Baloch, during an operation for training for the extremist organization Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. A female suicide bomber struck in the Bajaur tribal district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly Bajaur Agency) in December 2010 while food was being distributed to locals under the World Food Program. The attack killed 43 people and injured more than 100. In 2010, Meena Gul, a 12-year-old Afghan refugee, confessed to security officials that she had been trained by the Taliban to carry out suicide attacks and that there were several cells in Pakistan’s tribal areas where girls were targeted. Another suicide attack by a woman in Pakistan took place on June 25, 2011 when an Uzbek couple blew themselves up near a police station in Dera Ismail Khan. Former Jamaat-e-Islami chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed was the victim of a suicide attack in Mohmand Agency in 2012 in which the attacker was a woman. Qazi Hussain Ahmed survived the attack, which was claimed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). In June 2013, a female attacker targeted a Sardar Bahadur Khan University bus in Quetta, killing 25 people, including women. The extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility for the attack. According to the South Asian Terrorism Portal, there were 460 suicide attacks in Pakistan between 2002 and 2017, six of which were carried out by female attackers.
It is important to mention here that Baloch politics is rooted in the Baloch Students’ Organization, a student organization that believes in Marxist ideology. In their study circles, there is always a debate on the politics of conflict and the anti-state mentality of the youth is created from the platform of Baloch Students’ Organization. They are mentality geared up to accept it that the solution to all the problems of Balochistan is resistance and take up arms against the state. Influenced by the resistance politics platform of the Baloch Students Organization, many young people lost their lives in the student era, felt that the solution to the political, economic and social problems of Balochistan was to fight against the state.
So, the conscious and educated females who had no history of being treated unfairly by her family or any other state or organization, have done so out of revenge. Rather, these women were followers of the ideology of these organizations as the recent suicide bomber was also the follower of the same ideology. Some others include Noreen Leghari, who was arrested before the attack, and Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani-American who was killed in a 2015 attack in the US state of California. Both women were not only self-educated but also belonged to an educated family. Tashfeen Malik was the mother of a baby girl, who was six months old at the time of her death. According to counter-terrorism expert, female suicide bombers are used by extremist groups because they are closer to the target. Although extremist groups such as al-Qaeda or the Taliban have never openly acknowledged that they have used female suicide bombers in their operations, however, they have targeted women in several countries around the world, including Pakistan.