Militants armed with assault rifles and grenades attacked a security post in northwest Pakistan. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Militants armed with assault rifles and grenades attacked a security post in northwest Pakistan and killed 10 officers in an intense shootout, police said Friday, October 25, 2024.

“Other security forces were wounded in the overnight attack in Dera Ismail Khan, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province,” local police official Abdul Rauf said.

He said the assailants suffered casualties, but they fled along with their dead and injured accomplices when authorities dispatched reinforcements to the security post in the town of Draban.

Ali Amin Gandapur, the Chief Minister in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in a statement paid tributes to the security forces who were killed and offered his condolences to the families of the victims.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack but suspicion is likely to fall on Pakistani Taliban, who often target security forces across the country, especially in the former tribal regions in the troubled northwest.

Security forces recently have been conducting intelligence-based operations against Pakistani Taliban, who are known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and have been emboldened since the Afghan Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021.

The TTP is a separate group but a close ally of the Afghan Taliban.

The attack on the security post came within 24 hours of two separate operations in which security forces shot and killed 19 insurgents in Bajur, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Mianwali, a city in eastern Punjab province.

File picture of police officers examine the site of suicide bombing at a highway in Shangla, a district in the Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, on March 26, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

The Taliban defence ministry on Wednesday rejected Pakistan’s allegations that Afghans were involved in an attack on Chinese engineers, as ties between the neighbouring nations sour amidst rising insecurity.

Pakistan’s military had said at a press conference on Tuesday that a suicide bomb attack in March in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, that killed five Chinese engineers, was planned in neighbouring Afghanistan, and that the bomber was an Afghan national.

“Afghans are not involved in such matters,” said Mufti Enayatullah Khorazmim, the spokesperson for Afghanistan’s Taliban-run Ministry of National Defence.

“Blaming Afghanistan for such incidents is a failed attempt to divert attention from the truth of the matter and we strongly reject it,” he added.

A suicide bomber rammed a vehicle into a convoy of Chinese engineers working on a dam project in northwest Pakistan in March, killing six people.

“The killing of Chinese citizens in an area of ​​Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that is under tight security cover by the Pakistan Army shows the weakness of the Pakistani security agencies,” Khorazmim said.

Pakistan-Afghanistan relations sour

Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have soured in recent months. Islamabad says Kabul is not doing enough to tackle militant groups targeting Pakistan and in March Pakistan carried out airstrikes targeting militants on Afghan territory.

Last year, Pakistan expelled nearly 3,70,000 undocumented Afghan nationals, saying the majority of suicide attacks against its security forces were carried out by Afghans, a charge Kabul rejected.

Pakistan’s military spokesman said on Tuesday that security for 29,000 Chinese nationals in Pakistan, many of them working on infrastructure projects, was the top priority for security institutions.

The Taliban are also seeking economic ties with China, the first country to formally appoint an ambassador to Kabul under the Taliban, and wish to join China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is Beijing’s $65 billion investment in development and infrastructure.