ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan army’s media wing said on Monday nine militants had been killed in two separate military operations in the country’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, amid a surge of militancy in the region.
Islamabad blames an ongoing rise in militant attacks on its territory on neighboring Afghanistan, saying Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, leaders have taken refuge there and run camps to train insurgents to launch attacks inside Pakistan. The Afghan Taliban rulers in Kabul say rising violence in Pakistan is a domestic issue for Islamabad and it does not allow militants to operate on its soil.
The TTP pledges allegiance to, and gets its name from, the Afghan Taliban, but is not directly a part of the group. Its stated aim is to impose Islamic religious law in Pakistan, as the Taliban have done in Afghanistan.
“An intelligence based operation was conducted in Tira in Khyber District, where seven terrorists … were sent to hell by the Security Forces,” the army’s media wing said. “The killed terrorists were actively involved in numerous terrorist activities in the area and were wanted by Law Enforcement Agencies. Weapons, ammunition and explosives were also recovered from the killed terrorists.”
In another operation conducted in Lakki Marwat district, the amry said troops “effectively engaged” and killed two militants.
“Sanitization operations are being conducted to eliminate any terrorist found in the area as the Security Forces of Pakistan are determined to wipe out the menace of terrorism from the country,” the army said.
Pakistani forces were able to effectively dismantle the TTP and kill most of its top leadership in a string of military operations from 2014 onwards in the country’s tribal areas, driving most of the fighters across the border into Afghanistan, where Islamabad says they have regrouped. Kabul denies this.
Last month, the federal government announced it would launch a new counter-terrorism operation, Azm-e-Istehkam, but the campaign has so far been opposed by opposition parties.
