“I know, I know with certainty, that one day they will kill me.” The speaker, without fear or apparent emotion, is a young woman barely thirty-one years old. A young woman with a gaunt face framed by black hair and a dark shawl that barely covers her head. Mahrang Baloch, a medical doctor and human rights activist, has despite herself become such a symbol of her people's resistance that a few months ago she was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential young leaders in the world. The story starts far back, actually: from the Balochs' constant struggle against the Pakistani state that illegally occupied their land to turn the inhabitants into second-class citizens with no rights and no future. The story, for Mahrang, begins in 2006, when his father disappears overnight. After years of demands, prayers and protests, his body is finally found in 2011, dumped like garbage at the side of a road. In 2017, it was her brother who disappeared . “That was the moment I decided to protest for everyone,” Mahrang declares “I took off my veil and showed my face.” “We started a mass mobilization in schools,” the young woman continues, ”And we went from door to door to provide young people, especially young women, with political education.” Finally, in 2019, Mahrang founded the Baloch Yakjethi Committee, a human rights movement fighting against abuses by the Pakistani state. And on November 23, 2023, she and thousands of other women set out for Islamabad at the head of the mothers, daughters, sisters and wives of the thousands of people who disappear each year in the region at the hands of the army and the so-called 'Death Squads,' the death squads to which the state has contracted private prisons and torture cells. With children in tow, many with little ones in their arms, Mahrang and the others set out to walk as the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo did before them: hoping that the world will notice what is happening. Because in Balochistan, a region illegally occupied by Pakistan in 1948, a cultural and physical genocide has been going on for many, too many years: a full-blown ethnic cleansing that Pakistan has now been conducting on a large scale for almost two decades amid the indifference and silence of the rest of the world. Every year thousands of people disappear: taken by the army, law enforcement or death squads and never seen again. Sometimes they reappear, killed and dumped by the roadside with signs of torture on them. Or in mass graves, discovered by chance and immediately concealed by the state: or even, devoid of organs, thrown like garbage on hospital rooftops. They are intellectuals, human rights activists, dissident politicians, students, journalists, professors. They are young people, old people, women and even children: guilty only of being children or siblings of a dissident but, above all, of being Baloch. “For me, the most progressive aspect of our resistance is that thousands of women of all generations, from young teenagers to their mothers and aunts, their grandmothers and even great-grandmothers, have joined the cause,” Mahrang continues. This is not the first time the Baloch have marched in protest, but it is the first time women have been the driving force behind the uprising. For there are hundreds of cases of women being kidnapped, detained and tortured, used as sex slaves by the military and then thrown away alive or more often dead. Girls and women, as scripted, are met in Islamabad with baton blows and tear gas, with water cannons in the middle of winter: and, after nearly a month, they are forcibly cleared out. But Mahrang does not give up, just as the others do not. And in July, she organizes a large rally in Gwadar: hundreds of thousands flock from all over Balochistan: this time, the state sends two killers to assassinate the girl. However, by this time, she has already become a legend and is strenuously protected by her compatriots. As an audio recording of Gwadar's deputy commissioner circulates on social media, in which he can be heard threatening Mahrang's life, and other protest leaders and organizers, the young woman is invited by several international organizations, Time puts her on its list of young leaders, and invites her to the awards gala in New York. However, Pakistani authorities prevent her from leaving the country and seize her passport. Not only that, she and Sammi, another activist, are abandoned in the middle of the night on a highway with no phone, no documents, and no money. But that's not enough for Pakistan: a distinguished stranger from an equally unknown small town sues Mahrang for terrorism and 'inciting a riot.' His reputation is ripped to shreds by trolls in the army's pay. The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders , Mary Lawlor, expressed “deep concern about the incident” citing reports of “harassment, intimidation and ill-treatment.” For the moment Mahrang is still free, protected by her international fame and the more or less constant attention of the foreign press. But it is not known for how long. Because one day, near or far, someone will kill her. Because Balochistan is the skeleton in the closet, a closet already crammed with bulky skeletons, of Pakistan. A closet protected by a blanket of silence as thick as a steel curtain. A silence that the world should listen to before it is too late, and only the memory of Balochistan, and Mahrang and the others, remains.