ISLAMABAD: The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) strongly condemned the recent killings in the Pulwama district of Indian-administered Kashmir after a handful of civilians were killed and several others injured on Saturday, a statement released by the group read on Monday.
Terming the killings as an act of terrorism, the OIC’s General Secretariat “called upon the international community to play its role in order to reach a just and lasting solution to the conflict in Kashmir.”
It also urged the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to fulfill the aspirations of the Kashmiri people in accordance with relevant international resolutions.
A day earlier, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement wherein it reiterated Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s demand that “India has to allow investigations by an independent fact-finding commission of the OCHCR, OIC, and IPHRC into the ongoing gross human rights violations in IoK and to fulfill its obligations under the UN Security Council resolutions on Jammu and Kashmir.”
On Sunday, Qureshi urged the “champions of human rights” to prevail upon the administration in New Delhi to “put an immediate halt to the Kashmiri genocide.”
According to media reports, seven people were killed and dozens injured on Saturday when Indian forces opened fire at protesters in the valley.
The incident also prompted Kashmiri leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq to call for another demonstration on Monday. He said that the protest would give Indian troops yet another opportunity to “kill all of us at one time rather than killing us daily.”
The Foreign Office statement further stated that “despite hollow Indian claims, Jammu and Kashmir remains an internationally-recognized dispute, pending on the agenda of the UN Security Council.”
“The mindless killing spree carried out by the Indian occupation forces on Saturday is yet another example of the Indian atrocities against the innocent Kashmiris. India continues to kill and maim, under the garb of ‘combating terror’. In Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, every man, woman or a child who protests against India’s illegal occupation and brutalities against innocent and hapless Kashmiris, is a ‘terrorist’,” the statement added.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan reacted sharply to the Pulwama attack by strongly condemning the killings by Indian security forces. “Strongly condemn the killings of innocent Kashmiri civilians in Pulwama IoK by Indian security forces,” he tweeted on Sunday.
Reiterating that only dialogue can resolve the Kashmir-conflict, he added: “We will raise the issue of India’s human rights violations in IoK and demand the UNSC fulfill its Jammu & Kashmir plebiscite commitment.” “Kashmiri’s must be allowed to decide their future,” said PM Khan.
OIC condemns “terrorist act” by Indian forces in Kashmir
OIC condemns “terrorist act” by Indian forces in Kashmir
- Calls upon international community to fulfil its obligations
- Pakistan PM Khan says only dialogue can resolve the conflict
Pakistan’s Afghan salvo risks turning ‘open war’ into long crisis
- Nuclear-armed Pakistan has a formidable military of 660,000 active personnel, backed by a fleet of 465 combat aircraft
- But the Taliban have the option to lean on insurgent groups like the TTP and the BLA to move beyond border skirmishes
KARACHI: Weeks after the Taliban’s lightning offensive in 2021 wrested control of Afghanistan from a US-led military coalition, Pakistan’s then intelligence chief flew into the capital Kabul for talks, where the serving lieutenant general told a reporter: “Don’t worry, everything will be okay.”
Five years on, Islamabad — long seen as a patron of the Taliban — is locked in its heaviest fighting with the group, which Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif described on Friday (February 27) as an “open war.”
The turmoil means that a wide swathe of Asia — from the Gulf to the Himalayas — is now in flux, with the United States building up a military deployment against Afghanistan’s neighbor Iran even as relations between Pakistan and arch rival India remain on edge after four days of fighting last May.
At the heart of the conflict with Afghanistan is Pakistan’s accusation that the Afghan Taliban provides support to militant groups, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), that have wreaked havoc across inside the South Asian country.
The Afghan Taliban, which has previously fought alongside the TTP, denies the charge, insisting that Pakistan’s security situation is its internal problem.
The disagreement is a reflection of starkly incompatible positions taken by both sides, as Pakistan expected compliance after decades of support to the Taliban, which did not see itself beholden to Islamabad, analysts said.
“We all know that the government in Pakistan supported the Taliban, the Afghan Taliban for many years, in the 90s and the 2000s, and provided havens to them during the period where the US and NATO were in Afghanistan.
So there’s a very close relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan,” said Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh and an Afghanistan expert.
“It’s really surprising and shocking to many of us to see how quickly this relationship deteriorated,” she said.
Although tensions have simmered along their rugged 2,600-km (1,615-mile) frontier for months, following clashes last October, Friday’s fighting is notable because of Pakistan’s use of warplanes to hit Taliban military installations instead of confining the attacks to the militants it allegedly harbors.
These include targets deep inside the country in Kabul, as well as the southern city of Kandahar, the seat of Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, according to Pakistan military spokesman Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry.
The clashes are unlikely to end there.
“I think in the immediate aftermath, I think hostilities will subside. There will be, I hope there will be a ceasefire through mediation. But I do not see these tensions subsiding in the foreseeable future,” said Abdul Basit, an expert on militancy and violent extremism at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan has a formidable military of 660,000 active personnel, backed by a fleet of 465 combat aircraft, several thousand armored fighting vehicles and artillery pieces.
Across the border, the Afghan Taliban has only around 172,000 active military personnel, a smattering of armored vehicles and no real air force.
But the battle-hardened group, which took on a phalanx of Western military powers in 2001 and outlasted them, has the option to lean on insurgents like the TTP and the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), moving beyond border skirmishes.
Based in Pakistan’s largest and poorest province of Balochistan that borders both Iran and Afghanistan, the BLA has been at the center of a decades-long insurgency, which in recent years has staged large coordinated attacks.
Pakistan has long accused India of backing the insurgents, a charge repeatedly denied by New Delhi, which has retained a robust military deployment along the border since last May.
Although a raft of countries with influence — including China, Russia, Turkiye and Qatar — have indicated an openness to help mediate the conflict, all such efforts have been met with limited success so far.
