By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Security forces have killed seven militants in two operations in the country’s western provinces on Tuesday, officials said, after a month of deadly attacks, cross-border airstrikes and mounting recriminations between Islamabad and the Taliban regime in Kabul.
Five militants were killed in an intelligence-based operation in Bara, in Khyber district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and two in Chagai district of Balochistan, according to security sources and the interior ministry.
Security sources said those killed in Bara belonged to “Fitna al Khawarij”, the term the state uses for the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Large quantities of weapons and ammunition were recovered, and the group’s hideouts were “completely destroyed”, they said.
In Chagai, two militants were killed in the Nok Kacha area after they allegedly set an empty water tanker on fire and tried to flee. The sources said the men were also linked to arson attacks at several points along the N-40 highway. The operation was part of Operation Radd-ul-Fitna 3, and the sources described the dead as members of “Fitna al-Hindustan”, the state’s label for Baloch separatist groups, which it accuses of being backed by India.
The announcements came two days after the military’s media wing said more than 71 militants had been killed in Shaban and other areas of Balochistan. They also followed a gun attack on Monday in which three traffic policemen were killed and two passers-by injured when their van was attacked in KP, police said.
Pakistan is fighting two insurgencies: one by religiously motivated militant groups such as the TTP in the north-west, and another by ethnic Baloch separatists in the south-west. Both provinces border Afghanistan.
September has been especially violent. On 18 September, a gun-and-bomb assault on a police compound in Kohat, KP, killed 23 people, 17 of them police officers, according to police and counterterrorism officials. A faction led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur claimed responsibility. Two days later, two officers and four others were killed in a firefight in Hangu, in which eight militants also died. On Saturday, the TTP said it was behind an attack near the Aman Mela checkpoint in Dera Ismail Khan district that killed at least 12 people and wounded more than 30, police officials said.
Islamabad has repeatedly accused the Taliban authorities of sheltering the TTP and other groups that it says use Afghan territory to plan cross-border attacks. Pakistan carried out airstrikes in Afghanistan on 21 September, saying it had killed 28 militants. Islamabad struck 10 more locations on Thursday after saying drones had entered Pakistani airspace from Afghanistan.
The rhetoric hardened further over the weekend. On Sunday, Pakistan’s information ministry rejected as “frivolous, baseless and devoid of any truth” claims by the Afghan Taliban’s defence ministry that Daesh-affiliated groups had crossed the Durand Line into Nuristan’s Kamdesh district with Pakistan’s support. The ministry said no identities, documents, communications or forensic evidence had been offered to back the allegation, and said a video circulating online appeared to be staged. It urged Kabul to take “credible and verifiable action” against militant groups on its soil. The Foreign Office also said it had delivered a demarche to the Afghan side over airspace violations by drones.
Data from the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS) shows the scale of the violence. At least 378 people were killed in August as attacks rose. Security operations accounted for 203 militants, while 54 security personnel died, a decrease on July. Balochistan was the “most affected” province, followed by KP.
Copyright © 2021 Independent Pakistan | All rights reserved
