The Iran Deal Nobody Agrees On
Trump declared the Iran deal largely done on Saturday night. Iran called it incomplete and inconsistent with reality the same evening. Gaza: 72,599 dead. Kyiv: a third Oreshnik. Quetta: 24 dead
PAKISTAN / BALOCHISTAN
Quetta: 24 Dead on the Shuttle Train
The shuttle train was carrying military personnel between stations in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan, when the bomb detonated on Sunday, May 24. The engine and three coaches derailed. At least 24 people were killed, including army servicemen. More than 50 were wounded. Federal Minister for Railways Hanif Abbasi confirmed the sequence from the wreckage: the blast derailed the engine first, then the coaches came down around it. Paramilitary soldiers and volunteers pulled victims from overturned carriages on the track. The Balochistan Liberation Army claimed responsibility before the day was out.
This is not a new organization. The BLA claimed the November 2024 bombing at Quetta railway station that killed 32. It claimed the September 2025 car bomb at the Federal Constabulary headquarters that killed 16. The operational logic across all three attacks is consistent: hit the symbols and personnel of the Pakistani state’s integration project in a province whose natural resources finance the national economy and whose land corridor carries CPEC, and do it through personnel targets rather than symbolic ones. The BLA is designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States. Its stated base is in Afghanistan. Its stated objective is independence for an ethnic Baloch population that has never accepted absorption into the Pakistani federal structure as legitimate.
Pakistan’s military frames the insurgency as externally sponsored, Indian-proxied, funded through Afghan territory that Islamabad has been publicly and acrimoniously pressuring Kabul to clear. There is documentation for external facilitation. There is also a seventy-year record of Baloch political grievances, resource extraction without revenue return, enforced disappearances of activists, and a Pakistani state presence in the province that has functioned more as an occupation than a federation. Both things are true simultaneously. Islamabad treats the second as a foreign propaganda operation. The funerals in Quetta happen either way.
The timing carries its own weight. On May 23, the same day Asim Munir was in Tehran meeting President Pezeshkian as the primary mediator between Washington and the Islamic Republic, the organization that most consistently kills Pakistani soldiers was planning Sunday’s attack. The photograph released by the Iranian Presidency shows Munir seated with Pezeshkian, a picture of diplomatic consequence. Twenty-four hours later, his soldiers were being pulled from the wreckage of a train in his country’s most restive province.
Pakistan cannot simultaneously stabilize Balochistan, manage the Afghan frontier, hold together an economy under IMF structural adjustment, and conduct nuclear-adjacent diplomacy between two states that three months ago were at war with each other. It is attempting all of it. The question of which one gives way first is not rhetorical.
