The attack on Police Station Kotra in Jhal Magsi on the morning of 30 March was not just another skirmish in Balochistan’s long-running insurgency. It was a window into the true nature of the groups that claim to speak for the Baloch people. Around 40 fighters from the FAH-BLA and BLA rode in on motorcycles, intent on overrunning the police station. They were met by a police party that refused to break and, tellingly, by local residents who picked up whatever weapons they had and fought alongside the men in uniform. That simple fact, ordinary citizens choosing to resist the attackers, says more about who actually terrorizes Balochistan than any political manifesto ever could.
The terrorists, once repelled from the police station, moved into Kotra city. They even commandeered a mosque loudspeaker to announce that they meant no harm to the local population. By 9:55 am they had fled toward the mountains, taking their dead and wounded with them, one killed, two injured, according to the reports. But they left behind their real legacy: three wounded policemen, a young passerby killed, and two more civilians injured. That is the pattern. They come draped in the rhetoric of liberation, and they leave behind ordinary Baloch blood on the streets.
To see this attack as an isolated incident is to miss the larger rot. Look at the numbers for 2025 alone: 1,557 violent incidents across Balochistan, hundreds of lives lost. Not just security personnel, civilians and children. The March 2025 Jaffar Express hijacking, where the BLA held passengers for days and killed dozens; the Mastung bus bombing; the May 2025 Khuzdar school bus suicide attack that slaughtered children on their way to the school. These are not the actions of a resistance movement. They are the actions of a death cult that has perfected the art of using Baloch bodies as fuel for its own survival.
If there is to be a future for the province, it will come not from the barrel of a gun wielded by men hiding in foreign capitals.
And the cruelty is methodical. The BLA’s playbook has become painfully familiar. They seize towns like Zehri, Sorab, and Panjgur, storming police stations, looting government treasuries, torching buildings, and vanishing with public funds. They burn construction equipment in Ziarat, not out of some ideological conviction, but because development is their enemy. Every road they sabotage, every machine they destroy, is a job wiped out, a future erased. They turn highways into killing zones with IEDs and ambushes, turning travel into a gamble. Families in remote villages cannot even reach hospitals in an emergency because these groups have made movement a death sentence. Then, when the state is forced to respond with temporary mobile shutdowns or utility blackouts in affected districts, the same terrorists cry oppression, conveniently ignoring that they manufactured the crisis in the first place.
This is a deliberate cycle: create chaos, then weaponize the state’s countermeasures as propaganda. But the cycle does not sustain itself. There are external hands feeding the fire, actors who find it useful to keep Balochistan bleeding. The result is a province trapped in a loop of deprivation. Schools close because parents are afraid to send their children. Investors flee because no one builds where bombs go off. Roads stay empty. And the people who pay the heaviest price are the very Baloch families these groups claim to champion.
Perhaps the most damning detail is the one rarely discussed. The foot soldiers, the young men sent to die in attacks like the one on Kotra are cannon fodder. Their leaders and the leaders’ children reside in safe havens in Europe and neighboring countries, far from the violence they orchestrate. They enjoy security, comfort, and the privileges of the very nations they ostensibly oppose, while ordinary Baloch youth are fed a narrative of “resistance” that ends in a grave.
The BLA and BLF do not build schools, pave roads, or create jobs. They loot, they burn, and they isolate. They have become the single largest obstacle to the prosperity and dignity that the people of Balochistan deserve. The attack on Police Station Kotra failed because the police and the community stood together, a fact that should give us hope, but also a reminder that the people of Balochistan have been held hostage for too long by those who claim to speak for them but only ever bring them sorrow. If there is to be a future for the province, it will come not from the barrel of a gun wielded by men hiding in foreign capitals, but from the resilience of those who refuse to let their homeland be turned into a graveyard for someone else’s agenda.
The writer is MS Research Scholar at IIUI, a freelance content writer and a columnist.