Baloch, Southern

The Baloch of Bahrain descend from soldiers recruited from Makran, on the coast of Pakistan and Iran, and from Oman, beginning with the levy unit that formed Bahrain's first standing army in 1923. For a century they have filled much of the rank and file of the police, riot police, National Guard and army, recruited through kinship networks that still bring men from Balochistan today. Older families have taken the surname Al-Balushi, married into Sunni Arab families and become Bahraini in language and dress, while newer recruits keep Southern Balochi and Urdu. As Sunni Muslims, many of them naturalised, they stand on the government side of the country's Sunni-Shia divide, and Shia Bahrainis resent them as the face of the 2011 crackdown. The Baloch Club Bahrain, founded in 1973, keeps Balochi music, poetry and the do-chaapi circle dance alive at community events and National Day celebrations.

The Southern Baloch of Iran are the Makrani Baloch of the Gulf of Oman coast and the date-palm valleys behind it, from Chabahar, Konarak and Dashtiari in the south to Iranshahr, Bampur, Sarbaz and Nikshahr inland, with outliers in eastern Hormozgan and southern Kerman. They speak Southern (Makrani) Balochi, the same variety as their kin across the Pakistani border in Gwadar and Turbat, and are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school in Shia-ruled Iran. Coastal Baloch fishing communities, including the Med, sing the amba work songs as they haul nets from wooden boats, while inland families live from date groves, herding and the cross-border trade. Chabahar, Iran's only ocean port, is the focus of a state Makran coastal development plan that many Baloch see as a threat of land seizure and demographic change.

The Omani Baloch are the country's largest non-Arab people, descendants of soldiers, sailors and settlers from Makran who served Oman's rulers from the seventeenth century, defended Muscat, fought in the sultans' East African campaigns and formed the core of the first modern army. Oman held the Makran port of Gwadar from 1783 to 1958, and recruiting in Makran continued long after, so most families are Omani citizens with the surname al-Balushi and kin across the Gulf of Oman. Older families of Muscat and the Batinah now speak Arabic first and a local Balochi full of Arabic, while men recruited from the 1950s onward and newer arrivals keep the Southern Balochi of Makran. Muscat is the largest Baloch centre outside Balochistan and Karachi, and its wedding bands, lewa and guati drumming and henna nights carry Baloch music into Omani national culture. Most are Sunni Muslims, with a Shia minority.

The Baloch of Qatar are Sunni Muslims from Balochistan, mostly from Iran's Sistan va Baluchestan with others from Pakistan's Makran coast and from Oman, who have come since the 1950s oil boom, many crossing the Gulf by boat, to work as labourers, drivers, fishermen, guards and soldiers. The government housed them first in central Doha and in 1984 moved them to a compound on the city's edge, Al Baluche Camp in Abu Hamour, where houses could be built only from plywood, timber and corrugated metal and were officially temporary; some 15,000 people lived in its 900 to 1,000 houses, with five mosques of their own, when a new order threatened them with eviction in 2022. Even men who arrived as boys in the 1960s still live on yearly work permits, so families save to build houses back in Balochistan, while young men from Pakistani Balochistan are still recruited into Qatar's security forces. At home they speak Balochi, and women and children wear richly embroidered Balochi dress. Older Baloch families who settled before independence have become Arabic-speaking Qatari citizens.