Four days after the attack and capture of the Jaffar Express by Baloch rebels in Balochistan’s Bolan region, it’s not clear if the Pakistani army personnel on board are dead or alive. Reports indicated there were as many as 200 of them taken hostage by the rebels.
“I think this is the first kind of operation that this combined force of three or four Baloch groups have carried out,” said Vikram Sood, former chief of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW). “It’s remarkable in the sense that it was planned beautifully. It was executed beautifully. And they had the weapons. They knew what to do because it’s not easy to just stop (a train) … it’s not like stopping a car. You stop the whole train.”
He noted how the rebels segregated the good guys and the bad guys. And then called for a deal on the hostages. Therefore, it marks a remarkable shift in the operational capability of the Baloch. While this is something significant, he was not sure if this was something they could retain.
“I read a report that all the hostages have been killed by the Baloch, they’ve killed them, which would be a huge loss for the loss of face for the Pakistan Army. And, I don’t know how they’re actually going to retaliate.”
The usual way, he said, was to go in with guns blazing, bringing all heavy military hardware but that won’t help matters. It won’t solve the basic issue that the Baloch have now upgraded to a certain level.
Earlier Baloch uprisings were led by feudal lords, he noted, but this time there are professionals in the ranks of the Baloch fighters, doctors, engineers even women have joined the battle.
Sood was not clear about who was backing the Baloch rebels, but he pointed to the similar goals of the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan. Also interesting to note, the Baloch have been able to access the huge stockpiles of small arms and ammunition abandoned by the Americans when they left Afghanistan.
Tune in for more in this conversation with Vikram Sood, former chief of the Research & Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency
