On March 11, an armed band of 100 militants hijacked a passenger train in Pakistan, which had around 500 travelers on board. The train was bound for Peshawar, the capital city of Pakistan’s northwestern province of Kyber Pakhtunkhwa on the border with Afghanistan. The train was barely three hours out of Quetta, the capital city of Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan, when a bomb hidden under the train tracks detonated and blew it off the rails.
The Baluch Liberation Army, which is widely known by its acronym BLA, claimed responsibility. It stated that the hijacking was “a direct response to Pakistan’s decades-long colonial occupation of Balochistan and the relentless war crimes committed against the Baloch people.” The United Nations Security Council, however, “condemned in the strongest terms” what it called “the heinous and cowardly terrorist attack.”
The hijackers, after seizing the train, split the riders into groups according to their ethnicities and occupations. They started shooting those who hailed from the Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, and off-duty service members, killing 26. The BLA warned the security forces that engaged them on the scene that if their operation continued, they would execute all hostages. The hijackers had suicide bombers planted among the hostages. When security forces first arrived, their sharp shooters apparently averted the carnage by taking out the suicide bombers. They then turned to the hijackers and killed 33 of them. The rest escaped into their hideouts in the nearby mountains.
The BLA is a militant nationalist outfit that the United States lists as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization. It has long been waging war against Pakistan to secure the secession of Baluchistan. Although the Baluch resistance movement commands wide sympathy across Pakistan, especially among progressive Pakistanis, Baluch militants have scant support in comparison.
Their diluted support can be traced to three major factors. Their aim is to terrorize anyone working for the government to shut it down. Their violent tactics burnish their warrior credentials and diminish government writ in direct proportion. Baluch militants also commit indiscriminate violence against laborers of rival ethnicities, whom they abduct and kill. Spinning violence into ethnic warfare is a regressive approach that disgusts progressive Pakistanis. Finally, Baluch militants have long started indulging in sectarian violence, targeting Muslims of Shiite faith. Sectarian assaults have, especially, shot up since the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul in 2021.
Militant violence, equally, hurts the Baluch resistance movement that stewards Baluchistan’s ecological treasures. The region is home to 40 percent of the country’s mineral wealth, its longest coastline, and immense marine life. The resistance movement comprising the region’s leading political parties—the Balochistan National Party (BNP) and National Party (NP)—has long worked for ecological federalism within the framework of the country’s constitution. It has won historic victories with an amendment to the constitution that ensures provincial autonomy, the National Finance Commission Award, the Water Apportionment Accord, and the Protection of Rights of Balochistan. Unlike the militants, the BNP and NP practice progressive inclusivism and embrace all ethnic, religious and cross-class communities that call Baluchistan their home.
The third pillar of the resistance movement is the Baluch Unity Council (BUC), which has Pakistan-wide support. The BUC attracts tens, and sometimes hundreds, of thousands of people to its public rallies. Its leaders are two young women: Mehrang Baluch, whom Time magazine, in 2024, named one of the 100 most influential leaders of the year, and Sammi Deen Baluch, who was honored the same year with the Front Line Defenders Award in Dublin, Ireland, for her work on human rights. It is unprecedented in a tradition-bound, patriarchal Baluch society to have women lead political organizations, whose support base is vastly made up of men.
The Baluch resistance movement and its leaders, who operate within the constitution and constitutional federalism, find themselves in a dilemma after the trainjack incident. They can’t defend the BLA’s violence against innocent men, women, and children just to weaken the state writ. Nor can they condemn it for fear of being portrayed as “government stooges.”
The inflection point in the BLA’s violent tactics came with the return of the Taliban to Kabul, which has since become safe haven for multiple terrorist organizations. One of these organizations is the Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP). Designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States, the TTP is extremely regressive, misogynist, hidebound, and sectarian in its ideology and strategy. It openly operates in Afghanistan and is supported by the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Over the past ten years, the BLA has joined forces with the TTP to mount coordinated attacks in Baluchistan. Some reports claim the BLA has even merged with the TTP. Although the BLA has a deep secular past, its current iteration has grown into a sectarian outfit despite its professions to the contrary. Yet the BLA’s secularism and the TTP’s sectarianism blur in their shared desire to overthrow the government in Islamabad. To the BLA, Islamabad is a colonial power, and to the TTP, it is an infidel state.
The BLA’s sectarian cast is puzzling for many in Pakistan. The key to this puzzle lies in the demography and geography of Baluchistan. The Baloch population spans three sovereign jurisdictions in three neighboring countries: Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. The BLA operates in the Baloch territory of Afghanistan and Pakistani Baluchistan, but has a deep sense of solidarity with Baluchs in Iran. As Baluch-Iranians are predominantly Sunni Muslims, they frame their political struggle in the “freedom of faith.”
For their part, TTP, ISIS-K, and al-Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, are the sworn enemies of Shiite Islam. BLA draws support from all these organizations, which gave its militancy an anti-Shiite cast at the expense of its secular past. One of the ISIS-K leaders who orchestrated the massacre of the Abby Gate in Afghanistan in 2021, in which 13 U.S. marines and 160 Afghans were killed, was also arrested in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area. President Trump, in his March 4 speech to the U.S. Congress, announced this arrest and “credited the government of Pakistan for helping to arrest this “monster.””
Terrorist organizations operating in Afghanistan menace all its neighbors, including Pakistan. In January 2024, ISIS-K was suspected in a deadly attack in Kerman, Iran, which killed 100 people. In March last year, it mounted an even deadlier attack at a concert hall in Moscow, which killed 145 people. Now the BLA has seized a passenger train in Pakistan. The Taliban themselves are not far behind in terms of cross-border violence. They allegedly placed a bounty of $500,000 on the head of a progressive Pashtun Pakistani leader. The Afghan deputy minister for the interior, however, laughed off the allegation, bragging that if the Taliban wanted, they could have the leader assassinated for 500 Pakistani rupees (less than $2). It is in the interest of the Taliban to sever all ties to terrorist organizations, form an inclusive government, end gender apartheid (by allowing women and girls to work and get an education), and stop being complicit in the continued suffering of fellow Afghans.