Testing own medicine: Terrorists attack Pak air force base, damage 3 aircraft, all 9 killed
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: As Pakistan forced 1.7 million “illegal” Afghan refugees to flee home this week, supports the Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel, and heads to hold General Elections to the National Assembly in February next year, a little-known terror outfit, Tehreek-e-Jihad Pakistan (TJP) launched a massive attack on a major Pakistan Air Force (PAF) airbase and damaged three aircraft before they were killed on Saturday morning.
In a media statement, the Tehreek-e-Jihad Pakistan (TJP), a new terror group that is an affiliate of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an offshoot of the ruling Afghan Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack.
The incident happened two weeks after three-time Prime Minister Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif returned home from a four-year-long self-exile in London and started leading the election campaign of his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N).
Condemning the attack, caretaker Prime Minister Anwaarul Haq Kakar said, “Any attempt to undermine our security will meet with unwavering resistance.”
According to the media reports, quoting the Pakistani Army, nine heavily armed TJP members attacked the Mianwali Training Air Base in Pakistan’s Punjab province and damaged three already phased-out non-functioning aircraft. No damage was done to any of the PAF’s functional operational assets, the army claimed.
“All of them were sent to hell,” the army said, a day after the terrorists, in a series of three separate strikes, killed 17 of its soldiers.
The military confirmed that the “combing and clearance operation at PAF Training Airbase Mianwali has been concluded and all nine terrorists have been sent to hell.”
The operation was launched to “eliminate any potential threat in the surrounding area following the cowardly and failed terrorist attack on the base this morning,” the statement said.
The attack comes hours after a series of terror strikes killed at least 17 soldiers in the restive Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces.
Fourteen Pakistani soldiers were killed on Friday when terrorists ambushed two vehicles carrying security forces from Pasni to the Ormara area of Gwadar district in the southwestern Balochistan province.
Friday’s count is the heaviest suffered by the military in Balochistan province this year where separatists have stepped up their attacks since a ceasefire deal between TTP and Islamabad ended in November 2022.
Hours before the Gwadar attack, a series of bomb blasts targeting convoys of police and security forces killed one soldier and five others and wounded 24 others in the Dera Ismail Khan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Two soldiers were killed in another attack in Lakki Marwat district in the same province.
Interim Interior Minister Sarfraz Bugti said the names of terrorists involved in Friday’s and Saturday’s attacks “must have been different but the enemy behind the scenes is the same.”
He termed the current wave of terror a “conspiracy to make Pakistan a target of uncertainty and instability once again.”
Throughout the year, terrorists have been targeting security forces in Pakistan, mainly in the troubled Balochistan province. Two soldiers were killed in the Khoro area of Awaran district last Sunday.
In July, 12 soldiers were killed in separate military operations in the Zhob and Sui areas of Balochistan.
Pakistan has been facing a rise in terrorist violence in the wake of the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan in August 2021.
According to a Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS) report issued in September, Pakistan suffered 99 attacks in August, the highest number in a single month since November 2014. The number of terror attacks in August was the highest tally for monthly strikes in almost nine years.
The Gwadar district has seen the highest number of attacks in recent months and in August separatists belonging to the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army attacked a convoy of 23 Chinese engineers in the port town of Gwadar.
The Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS), a think tank, in a report released in October, noted that the security forces lost at least 386 personnel in the first nine months of 2023, marking an eight-year high.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan were the primary centers of violence, accounting for nearly 94 percent of all fatalities and 89 percent of attacks (including incidents of terrorism and security forces operations) recorded during this period.
