Nine were killed overnight in Iran after airstrikes by the Pakistan air force. These strikes were in response to an attack from Iran yesterday within Pakistan.
According to the AP, both attacks were targeting separatist militants near the border.
Pakistan’s air force launched retaliatory airstrikes early Thursday in Iran against alleged militant hideouts, killing at least nine people and further raising tensions between the neighbors.
Thursday’s attack followed one by Iran inside Pakistan on Tuesday. Both appeared to target Baluch militant groups with similar separatist goals on either side of the Iran-Pakistan border. The countries accuse each other of providing safe haven to the groups in their respective territories.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry described its attack Thursday as “a series of highly coordinated and specifically targeted precision military strikes.”
“This morning’s action was taken in light of credible intelligence of impending large scale terrorist activities,” it said in a statement. “This action is a manifestation of Pakistan’s unflinching resolve to protect and defend its national security against all threats.”
Pakistan’s military described using “killer drones, rockets, loitering munitions and standoff weapons” in the attack. Standoff weapons are missiles fired from aircraft at a distance — likely meaning Pakistan’s fighter jets didn’t enter Iranian airspace.
A deputy governor of Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan province, Ali Reza Marhamati, gave the casualty figures from Thursday’s strike, saying the dead included three women, four children and two men near the town of Saravan along the border. He said the dead were not Iranian citizens.
The Baluch Liberation Army, an ethnic separatist group that has operated in the region since 2000, said in a statement the strikes targeted and killed its people. “Pakistan has martyred innocent Baluch people,” it said.
2024 is really shaping up to be something. Of all that I might have predicted, Iran and Pakistan at war wouldn’t have been one of them.