Pakistan's military has concluded a weeklong security operation in the restive southwestern Balochistan province, claiming the deaths of 216 fighters in targeted offensives. A military statement on Thursday said following the province-wide attacks by the separatist Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), carried out to destabilise the peace of Balochistan, security forces launched Operation Radd-ul-Fitna-1 (countering chaos) to dismantle terrorist sleeper cells through sustained combing and sanitisation operations through meticulous planning and actionable intelligence.
Pakistan has been battling a separatist movement in Balochistan for decades, where rebels target state forces, foreign nationals and non-locals. At least eight policemen have been killed by suspected separatists who launched coordinated attacks in multiple cities across Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan province, officials said. Several police stations in the provincial capital of Quetta were targeted by alleged ethnic Baloch gunmen in an attack that began at about 3am local time (01:00 GMT) on Sunday.
A powerful car bomb blast outside the headquarters of Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps in the southwestern city of Quetta has killed at least 10 people and wounded more than 30 others, authorities said. The explosion, swiftly followed by heavy gunfire, tore through the vicinity of Zarghoon Road in Quetta, capital of Balochistan province, on Tuesday. list of 4 itemsend of list Two law enforcement personnel were killed while the rest of the dead were civilians, Bakht Muhammad Kakar, the provincial health minister, told Al Jazeera.
