Written by: Burz Kohi
English translation by: Zirmah Baloch
There was no drama in Sadu’s emergence. She neither built a myth around herself, nor announced her arrival, nor adopted the language through which people often make themselves appear greater than their actions. For years, she has lived among the same people with whom she still lives today, walked the same paths, taken part in the same conversations, and faced the same dangers. But the true emergence of some personalities does not happen on the day they first come into the public eye. It happens on the day people suddenly realize that what stood before them was far greater than they had imagined. My feeling about Sadu has always been something like this.
(1)
The evenings in the Baloch mountains are different from the evenings of the cities. In the cities, evening belongs to light; here, evening belongs to the earth. The mountains spread their dark silhouettes across the horizon, the valleys dissolve into blurred edges of blackness, and a scent fills the air that it would be an understatement to call merely the smell of soil. Because, it carries salt, dried grass, the dust of broken caravans too, and perhaps the echoes of the breaths of those who once walked this land and disappeared into some forgotten corner of history. Sadu does not see this scenario the way ordinary people do. She does not stop at the surface of a scene; her gaze always moves toward something that is present yet not entirely visible. She does not see mountains as mountains; she sees within them the sediment of centuries. She does not hear silence in the valleys; she hears the echoes of conversations buried within them.
People often search for her first identity in her appearance, although Sadu’s appearance is the least important part of her. The first mistake is to see her merely as a woman, and the second is to see her as a symbol. Yet after a few moments of conversation, both certainties lose their meaning. Gender, age, these details fade into the background, and only one thing remains before you: a mind in which resistance, perception, unrelenting search, and deep absorption are so intertwined that separating them becomes impossible.
And within the depths of that same mind—where memory, awareness, hardship, and reflection are woven together so tightly that no clear boundary can be drawn between them, another form has been quietly taking shape for years. It is the form that has now appeared on the screen of the BLA’s communication agency, emerging from some unknown, rocky, and remote corner of Balochistan in the shape of a long message of resistance. The material eye noticed her for the first time, surrounded by a well-organized group of armed ladies wearing military gear and clothing. Dust, mountains, boulders, motionless faces—and during it all, a woman whose presence makes being a woman seem insignificant, leaving just control, determination, and self-control.
This is the same Sadu that her loved ones affectionately refer to as Sadu, but the world now knows her as Commander Shahnaz Baloch. She was born in the historic town of Tump in Kech. Sadu was raised in the courtyards of Oasis School before pursuing her education at Tump Degree College. She was involved in the intellectual circles of the Baloch Students Organization Azad when she was a student. For many years, BSO-Azad has functioned as a nursery, a fundamental school, an intellectual ladder, and a window into Baloch resistance politics get mature. It is here that young minds first encounter nationhood, history, subjugation, freedom, and human dignity—not as concepts found in books, but as the fundamental questions of their lives.
Sadu is not merely an ordinary guerrilla fighter. Her significant meanings are extended far beyond that. She has emerged as the first female commander in the history of the Baloch resistance to rise through the ranks of command, leadership, and strategy within the organizational structure. The most mature and perhaps most mysterious aspect of her personality is that she walked this difficult path for more than seven years, beginning as an ordinary soldier and gradually advancing to a position of leadership. Yet throughout that entire journey, she remained so secretive, disciplined, restrained, and inwardly cautious that even her closest companions and daily associates remained unaware of this long commitment. This concealment was not simply secrecy; it was part of her temperament. It is a temperament that does not allow personalism, narcissism, cheap fame, or the desire to build an artificial myth around oneself to come anywhere near it.
And perhaps that is why there exists within her an iron confidence that is completely free from arrogance. When accompanying with her, one often feels that she does not think at the ordinary pace of her time. She does not believe in immediate results. She is not among those who have already answer for every question. She is never in a hurry, perhaps because she understands that most of life’s important truths do not arrive in a straight line. They come layer upon layer, with another layer beneath each one; behind every curtain lies another curtain. Eventually, one no longer knows whether one is moving toward reality itself or merely toward the possibility of reality. Perhaps that is why Sadu is more interested in structures rather than in answers. Because, she understands that those who spend their lives chasing answers often miss the essence of the questions from which all answers emerge.
Sometimes I feel that Sadu’s real attachment is not to the present, but to time itself. She certainly lives within her era, yet her gaze never stops now. Whenever she speaks about an event, it’s before and after remaining open before her eyes. For her, every event is part of a much longer chain of days. That is why she never accepts things in their immediate form. She has a habit of searching for the root of every problem, and then the root beneath that root. Some people begin with consequences; Sadu begins with causation. Some people rush toward answers; Sadu studies the structure of the question itself. Perhaps for this reason there is often a pause in her speech that does not arise from ignorance, but the reflection of thought.
(2)
Hence now, the evening has deepened. The mountains are dissolving into darkness. A solitary lamp flickers in the distance. The air is growing colder. Sadu sits silently, and I find myself thinking that perhaps her true significance lies not in what she knows, but in how she glimpses the things. There are many knowledgeable people in the world, but people with inner vision are rare. Sadu is one of those rare individuals who insist on seeing everything not at its surface, but in its deepest essence. Perhaps that is why, in her company, a person begins to discover things about himself that he has known for years but never truly realized. And perhaps this is the point where the introduction of a personality ends and its real story begins.
I cannot remember how many times I have witnessed people engaged in long discussions over an issue while Sadu sits silently. She does not immediately intervene. Perhaps because she understands that, in their early stages, most conversations are not really expressions of ideas but the release of emotions. People speak to relieve their anxieties. People argue to defend their beliefs. People invoke history to justify their circumstances. Sadu listens to all of this, but her attention is not fixed on the words themselves. She listens to the assumptions upon which the words are jotted down. She notices the silent premises that everyone has accepted but no one has spoken aloud. That is why, when she finally speaks, it often feels as though the conversation has, for the first time, come closer to its actual subject.
There is a peculiar kind of refusal in her nature. She does not accept easy explanations. She distrusts narratives that assign every problem to a single cause, just as she avoids those explanations that complicate reality to such an extent that no moral position remains possible. For her, the world is neither as simple as the orators describe it nor as ambiguous as some philosophers imagine. Reality exists in a difficult space between the two, where clarity and uncertainty must coexist.
Perhaps that is why Sadu never presents her opinion as the final word. She reaches conclusions, but she does not worship them.
Listening to her speak about Balochistan is a different experience. Not because she makes extraordinary claims, but because she refuses to confine this land within a single narrative. For her, a nation is not formed solely by its suffering, just as it is not formed solely by its victories. Nations are made from a complex mixture of memory, mistakes, dignity, fear, resistance, insight, foolishness, perseverance, and indifference. That is why she remains wary of any interpretation that reduces history either to a lament or to a boast. In her view, both are injustices to memory, because both reveal only one side of reality. The echo of this historical consciousness can also be heard in her recent reflections, where she views the story of Baloch women not merely through the mirror of the present but through the long passage of history. For her, the place of women in Baloch society is neither recent nor borrowed. It is part of a collective tradition in which honor, dignity, and participation have always been intertwined.
She argues that Baloch women have never been mere bystanders in social and political life. Throughout history, they have stood alongside men during difficult times, participated in important decisions, and played a role in shaping the future of their nation. To support this view, she points to Banadi Baloch, the sister of Mir Chakar Khan Rind, whose life demonstrates that Baloch women were familiar with leadership, strategy, and even participation in warfare centuries ago. According to Sadu, this tradition of active involvement was not meant to be broken. She believes that the Sandeman system was the first major force to weaken many traditional Baloch social structures, while the later Pakistani occupation deepened this divide by introducing new forms of social, cultural, and political disruption, including increased gender discrimination.
Yet, according to her, history never moves in only one direction. That is why she insists that, in the current phase of resistance, men and women have once again come together under the same line, the same organization, and the same goal. In her view, this change emerged from an intellectual outlook that declared sacrifice, comradeship, and collective responsibility to be national duties beyond the boundaries of gender, thereby challenging the artificial distances that had been established between men and women.
Because of this intellectual maturity, Sadu also appears different from the traditional, outdated, and opportunistic political mindset. She distances herself from disorganized, unprincipled, and non-revolutionary forms of struggle. There is no personalism in her, no narcissism, and no cheap desire for fame. She warns the Baloch nation that remaining silent in the face of oppression is not merely a political weakness but a betrayal of national pride, collective honor, and human dignity.
At the same time, she addresses Baloch women, but she does not call upon them merely as symbols, emotions, or temporary sources of enthusiasm. She wants women to participate with knowledge, awareness, wisdom, and intellectual understanding, because, according to her, participation without consciousness cannot create lasting meaning.
Her tone becomes firmer, more direct, and almost iron-like when she challenges the military power of her opponent. She says that the daughters of Balochistan are no longer soft targets; they have risen like a storm against oppression and are directly challenging the power of the region’s largest military structure. Another aspect of Sadu’s personality has always fascinated me. She regards both defeat and success as temporary conditions. Many people lose themselves entirely in defeat, while others lose themselves in success. Sadu keeps a distance from both. For her, the real question is not how many victories a nation has achieved or how many defeats it has endured. The real question is what those experiences have done to its consciousness. Did it learn anything from them? Did it understand itself better? Did it recognize its own illusions? If not, then victory itself becomes a civilized form of defeat.
Perhaps this is also why she understands hope differently. For her, hope is neither an emotional state nor an automatic certainty. Hope is an intellectual and moral act. It requires a person to see reality with all its difficulties and yet refuse to abandon the possibility of the future. That is why there is no complacency in Sadu, but neither is their despair. Instead, there is a third quality—one that can perhaps be called perseverance. The kind of perseverance that allows a person to remain standing, firmly and quietly, without noise.
(3)
The night has now entered its final stage. The darkness of the sky has taken on that depth which appears only in those hours when dawn has not yet broken, but the first invisible crack in the power of darkness has already emerged. The Baloch mountains still stand there with all their ruggedness and dignity, though now hidden from sight, like the ancient guardians of centuries who have not abandoned their watch but no longer announce their presence. The valleys lie silent, holding within them countless voices, countless names, and countless anonymous lives.
Whenever the wind passes through them, I feel as if the earth itself is speaking to its inhabitants. There are certain nights in Balochistan when a person feels more of the past than of the present, as though all the layers of time have slipped over one another, and suddenly history, memory, dreams, migration, defeat, desire, blood, and love begin to flow together in a single dark river.
I no longer remember Sadu as a face, a voice, a conversation, a gathering, or an event. I remember her as the essence from which time carves its rare personalities. Just as salt becomes part of the soil, and just as a mineral quality becomes part of water, there is something within certain souls that cannot be named. It is not merely knowledge. It is not intelligence. It is not courage. It is not even perseverance. Perhaps it is something that exists before all of these. Some ancient essence, some inner stature, some hidden axis around which a person’s inner self revolves. And when that axis breaks, a person becomes a stranger to himself.
Sadu’s emergence as a commander is not merely the emergence of an individual. It is the culmination of an organizational and symbolic evolution whose path was marked by Shaari’s sacrifice in 2022. For the first time in the narrative of resistance, a feminine dimension of sacrifice emerged with full intensity, and the relationship between women, willpower, sacrifice, and armed struggle gave rise to a new intellectual upheaval across the region. This was followed by the sacrifices of women from different social and educational backgrounds, including Summiya Qalandarani, Mahal, Droshum Baloch, Hatam Naz, Banadi, Zarina Baloch, Maryam Buzdar, Hawa, and Asifa Mengal, further expanding this chain of evolution. As a result, the presence of women in the Baloch struggle for freedom was no longer merely symbolic or exceptional. Gradually, it became a practical, organizational, and military dimension of resistance itself.
Yet the roots of this transformation are not found only in the mountains, the fronts, and the battlefields. During those same years, another aspect of Baloch national life was also taking shape. Daughters such as Mahrang Baloch stood at the forefront of protest caravans, sit-ins, and mass movements demanding accountability for enforced disappearances, political rights, and collective justice.
This too was a form of resistance. It was a path taken in the hope that the voices of protest might reach the hardened walls of colonial courts. But the colonial rule imposed upon Baloch land shattered that hope. The arrests, the 3 MPOs, the 4th Schedule, the punishment of political activists, and later the extension of enforced disappearances to women—all these events were not preserved in the Baloch collective consciousness as mere government measures. Instead, they became symbols of a broader experience of slavery, displacement, and subjugation.
Sadu has emerged as a new expression of this changing era. If Mahrang and her contemporaries represent the political self-awareness and peaceful resistance of the Baloch woman, then Sadu represents another expression of that same awareness—harsher, more confrontational, and more uncompromising.
(4)
Now a faint whiteness is appearing on the distant horizon. It is not yet dawn; only the first crack in the absolute darkness has emerged. In this moment, I no longer see Sadu as an individual, a name, a position, or an organizational rank. She appears to me as a door that has just opened—a corridor whose end the eye cannot yet fully see. This is only the beginning.
(5)
Now the whiteness on the horizon has become more visible. The dark foreheads of the mountains are gradually being touched by thin streams of light. The night is still there, but its authority no longer carries the same certainty as before.
And perhaps this is the very scene through which Sadu can be understood—not as a memory, not as a legend, and not as a tradition, but as a beginning. A beginning whose full meaning remains concealed in the womb of the future. That is why I do not write a including sentence about her, because including sentences are reserved for those whose journeys have come to an end. Sadu belongs to those unfinished mornings about which only one thing is certain: the sun has not yet fully risen, yet the horizon has already begun to bear witness to its arrival.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Balochistan Post or any of its editors.