The Jaffar Express train, traveling from Quetta to Peshawar with about four hundred passengers on board, was seized by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). The Bla blew up the tracks in a tunnel in the Sibi area and, in the firefight that followed the attack, killed about eleven people, wounded the driver and shot down a drone sent to the site by the Pakistani army. According to the group's statement (and later confirmed by the passengers themselves), all the civilians were immediately released and about two hundred members of the Pakistani army and intelligence services who were traveling in civilian clothes (as is now customary in the region) remained on the train as hostages of the guerrilla group. The names and ranks of the armed forces and intelligence personnel were published by the BLAST and confirmed on condition of anonymity by army sources. In the same hours, again by the BLAST, there were attacks on Pakistani army posts in the provinces of Khuzdar, Mastung, and Ormara. The group has ordered the Pakistani army to cease bombings and military operations, threatening to kill the prisoners, and has asked the government to release Baloch political prisoners and all those who have “disappeared” in the region at the hands of the police, army and Pakistani intelligence within 48 hours. The Balochistan Liberation Army, led by Bashir Zeb, is the best armed and most active of the groups fighting for the region's independence under a coordinated command known as BRAS. It includes many female fighters, suicide brigades and an intelligence department. It is well armed and in recent years seems to have forged links with the TTP (the so-called Pakistani Taliban who fight against Islamabad), benefitting from weapons abandoned by the Americans in Afghanistan and, some say, from the support of Iran. In 2019, the US State Department included the BLAS in the list of international terrorist groups to please Pakistan, which at the time was essential to bring home the disastrous Doha agreement that returned Afghanistan to the Taliban. In short, in Balochistan, a region illegally occupied by Pakistan in 1948, a cultural and physical genocide is taking place. Every year thousands of people disappear: they are taken by the army, by the police or by death squads, teams of criminals in the pay of the intelligence services, and are never seen again. Their bodies are occasionally found in mass graves or on the side of the road with signs of torture: activists, intellectuals, politicians, women, old people and children. In this region Pakistan carries out its nuclear experiments, there are more military bases than hospitals or schools, and in the name of the development and progress brought by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the Chinese have built real open-air prisons for the Baloch. The peaceful protests of the citizens, led by Dr. Maharang Baloch, recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, are being repressed in a more or less violent way in a deafening silence from both the government and the local press. The indiscriminate bombings of civilians throughout the region are also being passed over in silence: the last one was in Dera Bugti, two days ago. And while the tug-of-war between the Baloch and Islamabad is still going on, the Pakistani army and government, accustomed to brutalizing their own citizens rather than fighting against an army that seems more organized than the regular one, are reacting as expected: by forcing the local newspapers to spread outright lies (the civilians have been freed by the army, the Bla is on the run) that nobody believes anymore and accusing the usual 'foreign hand' (read: India) that wants to destabilize Pakistan. And Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif resorts to his infallible recipe in times of unrest in the country: a nice post on X to accuse Israel of brutal repression and genocide in Gaza.