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Welcome to the Watch for I'm Sarah Adams. Over the course of the last weekend, Pakistan's Balochistan province experienced a number of coordinated terrorist attacks spanning multiple cities. What's important to know from the onset is these were not isolated attacks. This was not a spontaneous event, and this was not the actions of some like rogue one off single cell. What we're witnessing here is a PL planned phased terrorist campaign and it's being led by the Bluestan Liberation army or most commonly the bla. If you are aware, the United States in the last year actually designated the BLA a foreign terrorist organization because of some of these changes and adaptations in their tactics. And they've taken, as you can imagine, a lot of these tactics from other terrorist group, specifically Al Qaeda and isis. When we talk about this campaign, of course the terrorists have named it. It translates to either like hero operations or heroic operations. And the one that just kicked off this weekend is basically phase two of this operation. I want to take a step back. I want to break down this operation and then I want to go through each tactic step by step. Just so it's clear what's going on here, let's take it to the watch floor. To understand phase two, you of course must first understand phase one, because what the BLA did is they carried out a series of attacks to probe security forces, to test them, and then to take those lessons learned and plan for this phase. It's very smart and very deliberate. So when they were testing in phase one, the things that we're looking for is of course the response time of security forces. Also they wanted to gauge the interplay between the police, the intelligence services, different elements within the military. Another thing is they wanted to see how all of those organizations could deal with simultaneous crises. And last, they really wanted to test the psychological resilience of the state. So this is a very familiar model. So Al Qaeda in Iraq used this sequencing, if you remember, in the 2006-2007 time period. And then immediately after that's when they declared, right, the Islamic State of Iraq. That's when it got formed. Another time this occurred when ISIS now was its own group, was in 2012 and 2020 13. And they did a lot of this probing before they really went in and did their urban assaults. And lastly, the Taliban did similar probing assaults from 2014 to 2015 in Helmand and Khandu's. And that was right before some of those districts in that area collapsed. I want you to think about it this way. You probe first. You measure the response that Comes and then you escalate later. The whole intent of phase one was to carry out some pretty big spontaneous, coordinated attacks, but then to come back around with what they learned and hit Pakistan harder. It's done extremely well. So when we talk about phase one, it kicked off, it had a launch day. And that Launch day was January 29, 2024. And this time and this event, it happened for a couple days and it gets termed the Operation Dar Ebolon. And at the time there was hundred of terrorists involved. They used suicide bombers, heavy weapons, they carried out attacks across multiple axises. They focused on front corps positions. So that's an element within the Pakistani military. They attacked police installations, they went after kind of rail and road infrastructure and then they attacked kind of like a central jail in Baluchistan. So the terrorists even claim that they control the whole Bolon pass for about 40 hours. You know, no matter if you believe the claim or not, they were able to prove sustained operations, centralized command and control. A lot of people act like this is just some insurgency that bubbles up here and there. Well, that was proved wrong. And then they really did a massive coordination campaign and it was to fool the public as to what was going on during kind of active combat. And it was really to get the public to support them and back them and look like maybe the Pakistani military was being heavy handed or creating atrocities, those type of things. You have to remember, this psychological piece is very important to terrorists. Now we had similar events like this and I really like walking through previous attacks. So if you ever want to compare them or even lay out scenarios like this, you could take this situation in Bluechistan and some of the older ones. So another example was also in khandu, it was 2015 and Taliban were running district level offenses. And then ISIS did these temporary urban seizures. If you remember, it was in Fallujah in early 2014. It was like, oh no, we're back to Fallujah. The terrorists are back in Fallujah. It was pretty jarring for a lot of people. Now if you know anything about Baluchistan though, and their usual operations of the different militant groups there, they do a lot of like hit and run tactics. So what we've been seeing since the first phase of this kicked off in 2024 is a change in those tactics. And I want to spend a lot of time on that today. Now the biggest operation in phase one happened in March of 2025. And this is when the terrorists basically assaulted the rail line and then hijacked the Jafar. Then this became A massive, as you can imagine, Pakistani military operation. So there's hundreds of people on the train at the time. It had civilians on the train, but it was also transporting military personnel. So we never actually got an official readout of who all died in the incident. We know more than 30 civilians were killed and then at least over 30 of the terrorists were killed. Obviously some of the military officers were also killed. But Pakistan really tried to keep it under wraps to not give the terrorists something extra to use for propaganda. This attack combined infrastructure interdiction, geographic isolation because they really hit the train in the middle of nowhere and then there was this hostage style pressure that occurred because it went on for so long. Now this mirrors the ISIS rail sabotage attacks that occurred in Iraq from 2013 to 2014. AQAP did a lot of transport quarter attacks in the 2011 to 2012 timeframe. And then Taliban did a bunch of these highway introductions in Ghazni and wardock provinces in 2018. And then they carried that forward by the end of Phase one. BLA demonstrated a number of things and I just want to walk through those first. First is they could show they can do synchronized attacks across a large piece of geography. They showed that they can deploy suicide units selectively, but also effectively. And then they showed they can do sustained operations beyond short engagements because remember, they reviewed more as a small scale insurgency attacks. So when you're carrying an attack for two or three days, that's a very big event. Lastly, they showed that they have now grasped this power to shape the information environment and that has been very impactful for them. When we go now to Phase two, they took those wins and those lessons learned and carried them over. Phase two kicked off the early morning hours of January 29, 2026. Yes, they use the same exact launch date that was done deliberately. And obviously they chose the early dawn hours because people really weren't on duty yet. It strains command and logistics and just information flow altogether. Now in this phase, they showed that they can escalate the attacks on a much grander scale. The geographic reach went broader, the operational tempo was so much faster. They really focused on urban exposure and that was to saturate law enforcement to think about it in that way. It's not spontaneous violence. You have this short time window and you do a bunch of attacks in a bunch of locations at the same time. Well, that stretches any security force thin. So that was the planned intent of the operation. And we've even seen that in some of the videos. We've seen situations like there was One and it was like a drone dropped or was recording an operation. And there were so few Pakistani military personnel in the area that the terrorists were able to bring in a couple people and pull their injured fellow attacker from the scene. Right. There was nobody there to stop them from taking them. So it just showed how spread out this incident was. And when it's happening in so many places that is really hard to get control of. Now we said this operation was by the bla. It was run by the group Samir, his name is Bashir Zeb. And then it had a couple different units associated with the bla. The biggest is the Majid Brigade. If you don't know this brigade, it's basically bla, so suicide bomber unit. Now the interesting thing with it is they have male and female suicide bombers. So that's why you're seeing women in some of these clips. Another thing is they were used against hardened targets, but also symbolic targets. This really is very similar to ISIS's Iggy Massey Brigades, AQI's Martyrdom Brigades and then Haqqani's Ishihadi unit. So we have seen these SU squads in a number of terrorist groups. It's just become newer in the last couple years in BLA and then they use their Fatah squad. So if you don't understand what this is, it's like an assault and exploitation team. But really what they're used as is they're the secondary wave of attacks. So if I send the Masjid brigade in and let's say we do two suicide bombings, one at a police building and one at just one of the other government buildings, then it would be the Fateh Squad who would bring in that next round of attackers and maybe would be a five man armed team for each of them. And so then those 10 would like carry on the assault and likely go into the buildings to commit atrocities. So just think of this as waived attack planning. I do want to walk through though some of the tactics so you're aware. And just so you know, this is what terrorists are doing. Now this attack is still ongoing, so I'm going to give some numbers, but everything's squishy right now. First off, I told you, BLA is running a misinformation campaign, so that's an issue. The second thing is, again, these are ongoing operations. So the Pakistani military isn't going to put out a lot of numbers and a lot of facts because they want to affect the terrorist mindset. So you want to make terrorists think, hey, we killed all the attackers at this location. And we killed all the attackers at this location. And this location is secured because you don't want them to send up in backups or reinforcements. You want them to think, oh, okay, that area is too hot, let's move somewhere else or let's stand down on this. So just keep that in mind. So you will see a lot of misinformation going around, good and bad reasons. From what we know right now, there's at least 20 civilian deaths, over a dozen security forces have been killed or government employees, that type of thing. And then the Pakistani military has carried out a number of operations. So we have operations where they actually found some of the terrorist prior to these attacks coming en route to some of the cities moving supplies and goods. So obviously there's captures in those situations. Then during the attacks there's engagements, captures and kills in that. And then there's these post attack situations going on of course, where they're trying to go out, find some of these BLA units to prevent further attacks because the attacks are still ongoing. Right. They're going to just hit another city if you don't go wrap them up. So when you look across these kind of three phases of responses, we're hearing at least 135 terrorists have been captured or killed. So if you think of an operation, if that's how many were captured and killed, it shows you how large in scale this type of attack was. There isn't just one or two attackers in each of these cities. So this is pretty broad. Let's talk tactics. The first one that matters the most is urban embedding. Phase two deliberately kicked off in urban areas or city centers. Obviously Quetta being a great example. This forced first responders to operate amid civilians, the morning traffic, media cameras. That creates friction, as you can imagine. But then obviously there's also a massive psychological impact. If you think of an attack right in downtown in your state capital. I live in Florida. So they just go straight at Tallahassee early in the morning when everybody's starting work. It's a very smart move. We saw ISIS do this very successfully in Mosul in 2016. And we've all seen Hamas do this again and again successfully in Gaza. Then I've already told you there was a number of suicide operations. They were used as strategic assets for multiple reasons. One was to breach fortified locations. A good example is you bring a suicide bomber up to maybe the gate outside of a military compound, you set off the suicide bomber, it gives you an in to do your second phase. Another is it really signaled the Resolve of these terrorists, right? If they're willing to blow themselves up or fight to the death, this is a different enemy you're dealing with. And lastly, the suicide bombings really kind of gave the second and third Wave attackers like, a win. It's like, hey, right, check. We got the first piece of this done. Let's keep moving. We are successful. This is working. Now I brought up how Majeed has women in it. So, yes, there were women suicide bombers used in this situation. We saw some video footage with one. She was kind of hiding out in a school. And when you use women, it obviously is an operational surprise because, you know, if a woman starts walking up, even towards a checkpoint, your first thought isn't that they're going to be a suicide bomber. Another thing is when women are involved, it really amplifies media focus and media attention and also brings some empathy. It's like, well, wow, a woman would be involved. What had to have happened to get her involved? People start kind of like filling in the gaps. Another thing is it's just a psychological shock, right? A woman's supposed to be a caregiver, a mother, and then you see them in this situation. And then lastly, the terrorists are hoping that if you see a woman in front of you, you're going to hesitate and she's going to be able to take advantage of that hesitation because you are not going to be willing to obviously shoot a woman if you have to, especially if she's wearing obviously, a suicide vest. So these are very similar to some of ISIS's late stage female deployments. Those are kind of in the 2017-2019 teen time frame. And then, of course, the Tamil Tigers used women pretty effectively Even during the 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. So another tactic we really need to talk about, and I spent a lot of time talking about this is disguising and infiltration. So in a number of these events, the terrorists, like I said, went at the police or the military, and most specifically the First Frontier Corps. So when they went to attack Frontier Corps locations, they were wearing Frontier Corps uniforms. Right? That throws someone off right at the onset of an attack. Right? Because now the attacker looks like you. Another thing is they had a number of like, stolen or forged identity cards to make it look like they might be military security, government personnel. So it's something you really have to keep in mind. I mean, we, our forces experienced a lot of this from 2006 to 2014 in Iraq. Both Al Qaeda and ISIS got really, really smart about trying to look like you. And Blend in like you and use the insider model of threat targeting. Now we did see drones and it was very interesting in the way they were used. They were used for route reconnaissance so the terrorists could get in safely and exfil safely if they needed to. That was used for isr and then the terrorists used it as post attack assessment. Right. Seeing what security forces were doing. ISIS had done this in the past. Hamas is very popular for doing this. And then of course TTP really just started taking this on. They started on 2022, but obviously at the end of December they said, hey, we have this whole unit made, we're ready to go. And they're really going to now take it from surveillance more to using it to do attacks. So this evolution in drone warfare comes from a number of places, but of course we have to factor in Iran and then the different way these terrorist groups employ it. Then as we've brought up, the information warfare around this literally started hour one. So right away there were claims of responsibility for the attack. Videos were coming out from everywhere regarding the attack. And then even the BLA had like branded propaganda videos about it. And I'm going to play one for you because it's very interesting. So this is the leader of the BLA and they released this during the incident. Now he did film it prior to it, but just watch this and film, think of how this came off in real time. It's almost like he's riding in with the calvary, you know, to carry out this big event. So let me play it. So really here BLA is treating like information dominance, you know, as a function of their combat. It's very smart and it's something we forget that terrorists do. But as you can imagine how that played out as people watched it and it really kind of elevated his position some that he thought through to make these videos in advance have the right branding for the second phase of kind of this like heroic operation. And it's really played out well for them, unfortunately. Now I'm going to walk through just a few of the cities and how the terrorists benefited or maybe why they focused on some of those locations. First off, we mentioned Quetta. Of course, Quetta is the capital, capital city of Baluchistan. So right. Hitting it is incredibly symbolic. It causes a lot of chaos. It brings media attention to the incident when you're in a place like that. And then of course it leads to a very large security deployment to the city and maximizes impacts. Now another one is Seabee and that one is the city where the Jafar Attack Express kicked off from, and hey, now they're back in the city operating successfully again. This time they hit like a commissioner's complex. They also then went at like Mastum and Colot. Now, these two cities are important because they're like thoroughfares or they're like logistics route. So if you affect the two, you affect response times in other locations. So some of this thinking was incredibly strategic. And then they hit the Frontier Corps, as I told you, they hit them in Nushki and other locations. And then to make sure the attack was really spread out, they hit Dalbandin, Karan, Panjgur and Gwadar. In all of these cases, it's interesting because they didn't just hit military or police or security forces, which BLA is really known for. I mean, women died in this situation. Children, the elderly, they even attacked day laborers. But when you look at all these cities, there is strategic infrastructure, targets pieced throughout all of it. And that really matters because that's the way, of course, Al Qaeda and ISIS look at targeting. And now it's being used kind of in this, like, Belush theater. And we have to pay attention to this evolution and tactics. When we talk about these evolutions, of course you're going to wonder, well, how did they evolve? Did they just get this online? No. So BLA and then the Baluchistan Liberation Front are like the two main terrorist groups operating in Pakistan's Balochistan. Well, as you can imagine, when Kabul fell in 2021 and Al Qaeda and the Taliban again wanted to make Afghanistan the base of international terrorism, they invited groups from all over the world into Afghanistan to attend training camps, to acquire weapons, to learn tradecraft and tactics, and even get financing with. Two of the groups that chose to do that are the BLA and we've seen them in a lot of Al Qaeda terrorist camps and the blf. And even the blf, they gave them kind of like an office in Kabul, so they have an official military office in Kabul. So these have become very close cooperative relationships where they are actually working together. And that's why we're seeing so many of these international terrorist group tactics happening in Baluchistan. So we're seeing these phase campaigns, discipline in the suicide bomber operations. We're seeing drone integration. And then the scale of information warfare is really something you would see from Al Qaeda or an isis. So they're importing these terrorist tactics that they're learning in Afghanistan. And we have to be really honest about that now looking ahead. So as these attacks are still ongoing, In Baluchistan. Now some coordinated attacks have occurred in the India side of Kashmir, right? So there's like Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, some people call it Indian Occupied Kashmir, some people refer to it. And the terrorists are on the India side doing attacks. And this is very smart and it's very interesting. And it seems to be like pre coordinated with the Bluchistan operation. So first off it's exploiting the momentum of everyone saying hey, these are insurgencies. Another thing is it expands the theaters of like these terrorist operations and then it's kind of like a multi front issue, especially for Pakistan. But also think about it this way. In Baluchistan, Pakistan is going to blame India for these operations. Right? In India, India is going to blame Pakistan for these operations. So the genius thing in it, the two nation states are just going to bicker among each other. No one's going to focus on the BLA or these terrorist groups from Kashmir. And surely no one's saying anything about the Taliban and Al Qaeda and Afghanistan who has helped prepare for these events. So we have to pay attention to those type of things too because the terrorists are really getting ahead of us on some of this messaging. Now I want you just to kind of take away that this phase two was well planned, it was deliberate. It's not something that happens suddenly. And there's so many different terrorist operations kind of in these type of cycles. If we learn from one, we're going to learn from another. The terrorists spent years testing, learning and adapting to carry out phase two. Well, we need to be looking at those adaptations and to prepare for events here. Now the terrorists took tactics, they even took messaging from isis, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, and of course even in Pakistan, the ttp. So again, all of those tactics now are being used in the blue theater. Well, these tactics are going to carry over into multiple theaters if we don't do something about the base of all this in Afghanistan. So the way the BLA looks at this, it's not like winning a day by carrying out these attacks. It's showing Pakistan that not only can they carry out a systematic campaign, but they can continue it. And phase three will even expand. Thanks for being here today on the watch floor.