To be a Karachi Bugti who yearns for watan and dry wood

To be a Karachi Bugti who yearns for watan and dry wood.

Key points

• Zareef Rind Published August 25, 2026 Updated August 25, 2026 11: 56am.
• For the individuals of Dera Bugti, the fighting reached a breaking point in 2005 and 2006.
• This August marks twenty years since Meerdali left Dera Bugti since Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti was killed in a military operation in their mountains.
• A few kilometres away, in Ghaggar Phatak, Alam Deen Bugti prepares for another day behind the wheel of a rented qingchi rickshaw.
• Jan Mir Bugti is one man who cannot remember the day his family left Dera Bugti since he was three years old.

It is 20 years since villages emptied upon Nawab Akbar Bugti's assassination.

Dawn breaks over Ghaggar Phatak on the edge of Karachi. In a cluster of huts stitched together from rough timber, patched canvas and weathered cloth, the morning begins much as it once did hundreds of kilometres away in the hills of Dera Bugti.

Inside an otaak, sixty-five-year-old Meerdali Bugti sits on a worn charpai with a faded rilli quilt. Beside the bed stands a recycled cooking-oil tin filled with drinking water, covered with cloth to keep it cool. Everything inside the hut has its place. It is a careful attempt to preserve a way of life.

Each morning is a memory. The crowing rooster carries him back to his village of Doi, where dawn arrived over green valleys and clear springs, and where the day began with birdsong instead of diesel engines. Then Karachi stirs around him. Motorcycles rip down the road. Trucks grumble past. Construction machinery pounds.

After Fajr prayers, he picks up a shovel and walks to a farm, where he spends the day coaxing water through irrigation channels. The work feeds his family. It does not quiet his thoughts.

"There is too much noise here, " he notes. "Where I came from, there was peace. The air had its own fragrance. Life flowed through our springs. For context, the mountains spoke to us. The flowers, the leaves, the lakes, everything was alive." He pauses as another truck rumbles past, overtaking his voice. "Now I am a man without a homeland."

This August marks twenty years since Meerdali left Dera Bugti since Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti was killed in a military operation in their mountains. He believed he would return within days. Instead, those days became years and like thousands of other Bugti tribesmen and their families, he rebuilt his life in scattered settlements throughout Sindh. The anniversary of August 26, 2006 will revive political debates over the conflict but for Meerdali that date marks something far more personal, the moment they became strangers to their own homeland.

Meanwhile, the conflict between the center and Baloch nationalists long predates 2006. Since Pakistan's creation, Balochistan has witnessed successive insurgencies, each ending militarily but leaving behind political grievances. Yet the insurgency that intensified in the early 2000s proved different. It spread throughout the province, drew in a younger generation of educated Baloch, and displaced entire communities whose stories were rarely recorded.

For the individuals of Dera Bugti, the fighting reached a breaking point in 2005 and 2006. As clashes intensified, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti left his fort for the surrounding mountains. His departure signaled that ordinary life was no longer feasible so families began leaving and villages steadily emptied. When Bugti was killed, thousands had already fled, and plenty of others followed in the months after.

Meanwhile, a fact-finding mission by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimated that at the height of the fighting, almost eighty-five per cent of Dera Bugti's population of around 182, 000 residents had been displaced. No official record tracks what became of them. There were no displacement camps, registers or programmes to support them rebuild or resettle. Families drifted throughout Sindh and Punjab, finding work wherever they could, on farms, in quarries, at kilns and factories.

Meerdali remembers the day he left. "Dera Bugti was under siege, " he notes. "Food had halted coming in. Shelling was happening everywhere. When the Nawab left for the mountains, ordinary individuals had no reason to stay."

There was no time to decide what to take. "We left wearing only the clothes on our backs." Everything else stayed behind. The roads filled before dawn. Children were loaded onto donkeys. Others climbed into stuffed trucks. After dry riverbeds and tracks through the hills to secure away from the shelling, plenty of simply kicked off walking.

"We thought we'd return in a few days, " Meerdali notes. As though surprised by his own innocence, "Who leaves their home forever?" He smiles faintly at the thought. No one locked their doors. No one wrapped family heirlooms in cloth.

For days they travelled south with whatever little flour and dried jujube they could carry. Every rumor of a safe road drew more individuals onto the same path. Every report of shelling forced them to change direction. A few villages away, in Pir Koh, Mahmood Bugti remembers the same journey differently. Before speaking regarding the road, he counts what stayed behind. "One hundred and forty sheep and goats, " he notes. "Ten cows. As though taking stock, chickens." He pauses after each number.

These animals had sustained the family for generations with milk, butter and meat. They could be sold when funds was scarce. They were inheritance as much as livelihood. "The hardest part wasn't the journey, " he notes. "It was leaving my homeland and my livelihood. Life has brought poverty. It has brought illness. But nothing has hurt me as much as being forced to leave."

Like Meerdali, he walked for two days before finding transport south. The farther they travelled, the more unfamiliar life became. "Back home, " he notes, "we hardly needed capital. Our land and our animals offered us everything." Here, he states, everything carries a cost. Bread. Water. Medicine.

For plenty of, the journey concluded wherever work could be discovered. For Sultan Bugti, it never concluded at all. When his family fled Loop Sehra under the protection of a military convoy, they reached Kashmore first. Then Khairpur. Then Jamshoro. Eventually they settled on a rocky hillside in Gadap, on Karachi's northern edge, where thirteen displaced Bugti families now live among piles of broken stone. Every few years, another move follows. "As long as this mountain gives us stone, we stay, " Sultan notes. Men chip away at the rock in the afternoon sun, their hammers ringing in the hillside. "The day it stops, we'll move somewhere else."

Meanwhile, the rhythm of life that revolved around livestock and land has been replaced by the uncertainty of daily wages. Before sunrise, men leave the settlement carrying hammers, shovels and pickaxes. Some know where they will work. Others walk towards the roadside hoping someone will need an extra pair of hands. By evening they return with whatever the day has offered, sometimes a thousand rupees, sometimes nothing at all.

In practice, a few kilometres away, in Ghaggar Phatak, Alam Deen Bugti prepares for another day behind the wheel of a rented qingchi rickshaw. Before earning anything for himself, he must first hand a thousand rupees to its owner. Fuel comes next. Whatever remains feeds his family.

When he arrived in Karachi almost twenty years ago, he believed the city would offer opportunities that the mountains never could. Instead, it kept asking questions he did not know how to answer. "They asked whether I was educated, " he notes. He wasn't. "They asked whether I had any skills." He smiles, not with embarrassment but resignation.

For context, the only skills he possessed were those his homeland had taught him, raising livestock, farming, reading the land. They had sustained his family for generations. In Karachi, they counted for little.

For years he broke stones in quarries scattered throughout Sindh before renting a qingchi. Now he spends twelve to fourteen hours weaving through Karachi's traffic, chasing enough passengers to create the day worthwhile.

Beyond Karachi's last paved roads, the settlements almost disappear into the landscape. At Ghaggar Phatak, a handful of huts stand shoulder to shoulder, built from timber, canvas and sheets of plastic held together by rope. Chickens scratch at the ground. Goats wander with indistinguishable purpose. Women bake bread over open fires and the children chase one another in the dust. A pipeline carrying water from Keenjhar Lake runs beside the settlement. The families fetch water from it in plastic containers.

In Gadap, the hillside tells a similar story. The huts blend into the colour of the mountain above the quarry where most of the men work. They are built to be dismantled as easily as they are erected. Everyone knows the arrangement is temporary. But one structure stands apart. It is always the otaak.

As evening arrives, the men drift towards the otaak without speaking. Dust is washed from hands and faces. Someone pours water into a steel cup and passes it around. Conversation gathers on its own. One man asks another how the day went. That is called Haal-hawal. The answer is never short. Stories move gradually around the otaak. One memory gives way to another. Someone recalls a wedding in Dera Bugti that lasted three days. Another remembers the spring where the village drew its water. Laughter arrives unexpectedly, followed just as rapidly by silence.

When relatives arrived without notice and neighbours stayed long after sunset, meerdali remembers a time when the otaak was never empty. Weddings stretched over days, confirmed by the beat of drums as hereditary Domb musicians walked from village to village. "Back then, " he notes, "people belonged to one another."

Memory has become its own geography. The older men remember the taste of the water, the scent of rain on earth, the paths their animals followed through the hills. They argue over distances between villages, laugh regarding weddings that lasted for days, and recall neighbors by name. That landscape survives since they continue to speak it aloud. Their children will inherit something different.

Jan Mir Bugti is one man who cannot remember the day his family left Dera Bugti since he was three years old. His memories are of moving from one stone quarry to another. School was always postponed. Now at 23, he loads crushed stone onto dumper trucks to feed thirteen individuals. He wants his children to go to school.

Notably, a few kilometres away, another child carries a different inheritance altogether. Ali Khan Bugti is fourteen and has never seen Dera Bugti. He was born after his parents fled, in Sanghar. But when you ask him where he is from, he answers without hesitation. "Balochistan." He has never walked beside its springs or climbed its hills. Yet he speaks of returning with the confidence of someone describing a place he has only just left. "One day, " he notes, pointing beyond Karachi's expanding edge, "I will go back."

For Meerdali, home is a place he can still describe in remarkable detail. For Jan Mir, it is something that disappeared before he was old enough to remember. For Ali, it exists almost entirely in imagination. Three generations. Three different relationships with the same place. Yet each speaks of Dera Bugti as though it still waits for them.

Not everything the families carried from Dera Bugti could be counted in heads or acres. Nadi Boojala Mangal unwraps a hand-embroidered cloth case with care. Inside rests his Nar-the wooden flute that he carried since he left his village of Kargaz Peshi in 2006. "My land stayed behind, " he notes. "My art did not." The flute travelled with him to Rohri, Sukkur, Sehwan Sharif and finally, Karachi. It belonged to his father, and grandfather before that. As a boy, Nadi learned the Nar-Sur tradition by ear. By playing until the melodies became memory.

He raises it to his lips. The first note wafts up. Children stop chasing one another. The men go silent. For context, the melody is a Dadari Sur, neither loud nor dramatic. "There is a saying in Balochi, " Nadi notes at last. " Wai watan, hushkein daar." Alas, homeland and dry wood. All photos by author.

For context, the author is a journalist from Balochistan writing on conflict and humanitarian problems. He can be reached at @zareefrind.

Taken together, the developments around to be a Karachi Bugti who yearns for watan and dry wood point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.