Rakhshanda Mehtab
There comes a moment when even the most careful observer has to set aside the language of nuance and call a thing what it actually is. What happened on the road to Mastung on 23 July 2026 was not a military engagement, not a guerrilla operation, not an act of war. It was the cold-blooded assassination of a sitting judge, paired with the murder of the policeman assigned to guard him. Sessions Judge Abdul Hakeem Kakar and his gunman never reached the courtroom that morning. The BLA saw to that. And anyone still searching for a political cause buried somewhere under all that blood needs to sit with a very uncomfortable question: since when does a freedom struggle require gunning down a man whose only weapon is a gavel.
The timing alone should strip away any remaining pretence. Barely a month before the ambush, the Anti-Terrorism Court in Quetta handed down life sentences to BYC leaders Mahrang Baloch and Sibghatullah Shahji for the 2024 murder of FC soldier Shabbir Ahmed during the Gwadar riots. That verdict took nerve, the kind of nerve that is in dangerously short supply. The BLA read the message clearly: the courts were willing to hold even well-connected political figures accountable. And so the BLA responded in the only language it knows, the language of the ambush and the bullet. A judge was murdered to make sure every other judge in the province understands the cost of doing their job. If you convict our people, the message went, we will kill yours. That is not retaliation in some abstract political sense. That is a protection racket run with assault rifles, designed to place the entire judiciary under a regime of fear.
This is where the TTP enters the picture, not as a footnote but as the original architect of this particular form of savagery. The TTP has spent years perfecting the tactic of targeting judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and court premises, all with one goal: to collapse terrorism trials and make the justice system unworkable. They know that a courtroom where a judge can still pronounce a sentence without looking over his shoulder is an existential threat. The BLA has studied this playbook and adopted it wholesale. Two groups that claim vastly different ideological foundations now share the same method: kill the men and women in black robes. There is no political philosophy on earth that justifies this. When your strategy depends on assassinating judges, you have abandoned any claim to being a political movement. You are a death squad with a press release.
The connection between the BYC and the BLA is not some fringe theory dreamed up by security analysts. It is the operating logic behind attacks like the one in Mastung. The BYC does not pull triggers. It does something arguably more insidious: it builds the narrative universe in which trigger-pulling becomes thinkable. Day after day, it pumps out the message that the state is an illegitimate occupying force, that its courts are a sham, that its police are an army of occupation. This constant drumbeat of delegitimisation creates the moral and emotional conditions for radicalisation. Young people who have marinated in this rhetoric start to see armed violence not as a crime but as an answer. The BYC provides the ideological scaffolding, and the BLA climbs it with guns in hand. When the courts finally held BYC leaders legally accountable, the BLA did not just protest. It went out and murdered a judge to protect the political ecosystem that sustains its recruitment and its narrative cover. This is a symbiotic relationship, a division of labour between the ones who radicalise and the ones who kill.
It is against this backdrop that the international campaigns for Mahrang Baloch’s release become not just misguided but actively harmful. Amnesty International and other advocacy groups have issued statements demanding her freedom, criticising Pakistan’s anti-terrorism laws and judicial procedures. Yet in all those carefully worded communiqués, there is a silence so loud it drowns out their moral authority. Not a single word about the FC soldier whose death triggered the trial. Not a single line about the judge assassinated on his way to work. No mention whatsoever of the three civilian bus passengers gunned down by the BLA in Mastung a single day before the judges were ambushed. Those passengers were ordinary people on a public road. Their driver, in a moment of understandable terror, tried to flee when armed men signalled the bus to stop. The gunmen responded by firing into the passenger cabin. Three dead. Three wounded. If a human rights organisation cannot bring itself to mention those bodies while demanding the release of the convicted, then it has ceased to function as a human rights watchdog. It has become a propaganda auxiliary.
That bus attack deserves more than a fleeting reference, because it exposes the BLA’s true character with brutal clarity. There were no security personnel on board, no government officials, no legitimate military targets by any stretch of the definition. There were only people, tired, probably thinking about home, about dinner, about their children. The BLA killed them without hesitation. And in the same week, Mastung absorbed a cascade of violence that tells the full story: an IED strike on a military convoy, the destruction of a bridge at Khad Kucha that severed a community from its economic lifelines, and the arrest of two women allegedly being prepared as BLA suicide bombers. Blowing up a bridge does not defeat an army.
[The writer is MS Research Scholar at IIUI, a freelance Content Writer & a Columnist Contact: [email protected]]
