Prathamesh Basagare, Pune
Two days after 12 of its soldiers were killed in two attacks, Pakistan’s army declared on Friday that it was very concerned that the militant organization TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) had discovered safe havens in neighboring Afghanistan and promised to take “effective action.”
After Islamist militants captured an army station in Pakistan’s southern Balochistan province, which borders Iran and Afghanistan, nine soldiers were slain. According to the military, three more soldiers were killed in a gunfight in the area on Wednesday.
“The sanctuaries and liberty of action available to the terrorists of proscribed TTP and other groups of that ilk in a neighboring country and availability of the latest weapons to the terrorists were noted as major reasons impacting the security of Pakistan,” Inter-Services Public Relations (ISP), the military’s media branch, stated in a statement.
The Pakistani army has accused the Taliban-led Afghan government twice in less than a week of giving the Pakistani Taliban a safe haven. The Pakistan Taliban are said to be responsible for recent terrorist attacks on army bases in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, two provinces that have seen an increase in violence since the IP ended the ceasefire with Islamabad in November of last year.
Requests for a reaction from the Taliban government in Afghanistan’s foreign ministry did not immediately elicit a response. Claims that Kabul allows extremist organizations to launch attacks on Pakistan from its territory have been disproven. A decades-old ethnic Baloch rebellion has caused problems in the mineral-rich area of Balochistan.