Where Balochistan Police got killed

I noted in an earlier post that we’d been working through some data on Balochistan Police killed in action. There are a million caveats with these data, but they provide at least a rough handle on some aspects of the conflict.

Today I want to show some preliminary evidence on the spatial distribution of violence. There is a problematic curiosity here, however: two “districts” are actually units of the police: Balochistan Constabulary (BC) and Anti-Terrorism Force (ATF).

Here are the top 15 areas/units of casualties (covering 93% of the fatalities):

We were able to do some digging on the B.C. fatalities. Of the 96 BC KIA, we found some evidence of where members were killed in 28 cases. All 28 were in the vicinity of Quetta, which could be 1) due to reporting being more likely around Quetta, or 2) the BC being heavily used in Quetta.

We’ll be doing more work, but it’s notable how much of the police targeting seems to have been in and around Quetta. The Army and Frontier Corps may be out in the rural areas disproportionately absorbing casualties that aren’t systematically publicized. There are also the Balochistan Levies’ “B areas”; I have been able to find basically nothing from this force. But even given all of this, the police data are a reminder that Balochistan is not simply a conflict of distant, rural, mountainous guerrilla warfare.