By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The military said on Tuesday that security forces killed 38 militants in four intelligence-led operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa over the weekend, including a commander the authorities described as a ringleader of a banned Islamist group they accuse of acting as an Indian proxy.
The operations, carried out between Nov. 15 and 16, targeted members of what the military calls Fitna al Khawarij, a pejorative term the Pakistani state uses for the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, the outlawed organization also known as the Pakistani Taliban.
In the first operation, in the Kulachi area of Dera Ismail Khan district, troops engaged a militant hide-out and killed 10 terrorists, the military’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations, said in a statement. Among those killed was a commander identified as Alam Mehsud.
A separate operation in Datta Khel, in North Waziristan district, resulted in the killing of five more militants, the statement added. Sanitisation operations are continuing in both areas “to eliminate any other Indian-sponsored kharji found in the area,” the ISPR said. The military vowed that the counterterrorism campaign would continue “to wipe out the menace of foreign-sponsored and supported terrorism from the country.”
In a separate statement later in the day, the ISPR said two IBOs took place between November 16-17 in Bajaur district and Bannu district, killing 11 and 12 terrorists, respectively. It added that terrorist ringleader Sajjad alias Abuzar was also killed in the Bajaur IBO.
President Asif Ali Zardari praised the operations, saying in a statement that the killing of the militant commander reflected the “successful strategy” of the security forces. Zardari said efforts to eliminate “foreign-backed terrorists” would continue with national consensus and warned that “political moves to divert attention from the national consensus on terrorism would not be tolerated.”
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also commended the troops, saying in a statement that “under the vision of Azm-i-Istehkam, security forces are achieving great successes against terrorism.” He added, “We are determined to completely eradicate all forms of terrorism from the country.”The operations were the latest in a string of intense clashes in recent weeks.
Last week, the military announced that security forces had killed at least 24 militants in three separate engagements in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces. Pakistan has seen a sharp rise in terrorist violence, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, since the TTP formally ended a ceasefire with the government in November 2022 and ordered its fighters to resume attacks on security forces, police and law-enforcement personnel.
In a separate incident on Tuesday, police in Bannu district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa said a militant attempt to destroy a bridge with an improvised explosive device failed when the bomb detonated prematurely, killing one attacker and wounding another who fled.
Amir Khan, a spokesman for the Bannu district police, said the two militants had been planting the device under the Doghoda Bridge when it exploded. One died at the scene; the injured militant escaped. Police have launched a search operation and are working to identify the dead attacker, Khan said.
The failed bombing came roughly a month after security forces repelled an attempted assault on a police station in Bannu’s Baka Khel area on Oct. 19, and just days after three militants were killed while trying to overrun a police checkpost in the district on Oct. 17. The renewed militancy has placed Pakistan’s security forces under sustained pressure in the northwestern border regions that were once the heartland of the Pakistani Taliban’s insurgency. Despite repeated military offensives over the past decade, pockets of militant activity have persisted, and analysts attribute partly to the Taliban’s return to power in neighboring Afghanistan in 2021, which emboldened allied groups across the border. Pakistani officials have repeatedly accused Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers of providing sanctuary to TTP, charges the Afghan Taliban deny, and have also claimed Indian intelligence agencies are supporting the group, allegations New Delhi rejects.
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