ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani soldier was killed and two of his colleagues were injured on Sunday morning, said the military’s media wing, ISPR, in an official statement, in an exchange of fire with militants in the southwestern Balochistan province while participating in an ongoing operation.
The incident also resulted in the killing of an armed militant.
Pakistan has witnessed a sharp increase in cross-border violence in areas adjoining Afghanistan in recent weeks, making its foreign office urge the administration in Kabul not to allow armed factions to use the Afghan soil to target other countries.
The officials in Islamabad have blamed a proscribed militant network, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) whose leadership is based in the neighboring state, for the recent surge in the militant attacks.
The TTP members took hostages at a police precinct in Bannu city earlier this month while its leadership took responsibility of a recent suicide blast in the federal capital.
“Based on credible intelligence, an operation has been initiated in Sambaza area of Zhob, Balochistan, for the last 96 hours to deny terrorists use of few suspected routes to move across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to sneak into [the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province] along the interprovincial boundary and target citizens and security forces,” the ISPR statement said.
“As a result of continuous surveillance and sanitization of the area, a group of terrorists was intercepted in early hours today,” it continued. “During the establishment of blocking positions to deny them escape routes, the terrorists opened fire onto the security forces.”
“During the ensuing heavy exchange of fire, one terrorist was killed while Sepoy Haq Nawaz embraced Shahadat [martyrdom] and two other soldiers got injured,” the statement added.
The ISPR said the militants were also supported by their “facilitators from across the border” who opened fire to provide them cover.
It informed that the “sanitization operation” was still continuing to apprehend the remaining militants in the area.
The statement did not elaborate which group these militants belonged to or who was helping them from across the border.
Apart from the overall issue of violent extremism, which is frequently attributed to the TTP and its affiliate groups, Balochistan has long been the scene of a low-level insurgency by various separatist factions demanding independence from the central government in Islamabad.
