Taliban suicide blast kills four, wounds dozens
A Pakistani Taliban suicide bomber rammed a police truck in southwestern Pakistan yesterday, killing at least four people and wounding more than 30, police said, just two days after the militants ended a ceasefire.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), separate from the Taliban in Afghanistan but sharing a common hardline Islamist ideology, earlier this week called off a shaky months-long ceasefire agreed with Islamabad and ordered its fighters to resume attacks across the nation.
Senior police official Azhar Mehesar said the blast had targeted a police team preparing to escort polio vaccinators in the city of Quetta and that those killed “include a policeman, a woman and a child”.
One of the wounded men had died at the hospital, said an official, Wasim Baig, adding that 15 police officers were among the wounded. In a statement, the TTP said a “holy warrior” detonated a car bomb near a customs post to avenge the killing of founding member Umar Khalid Khurasani during the truce. “Our revenge operations will continue,” the statement added.
The TTP was founded in 2007 by Pakistani jihadists who fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s before opposing Islamabad’s support for US intervention there after 9/11. For a time they held vast tracts of Pakistan’s tribal belt, imposing a radical interpretation of Islamic law and patrolling territory just 140km from the Pakistan capital.
The Pakistani military came down hard after 2014 when TTP militants raided a school for children of army personnel and killed nearly 150 people, most of them pupils. Its fighters were routed into Afghanistan, but Islamabad claims the Taliban in Kabul are now giving the TTP a foothold to stage assaults across the border.
In the year since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, Pakistan has seen a 50 per cent surge in militant attacks, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS). Most of these attacks have been focused in the western provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, which neighbour Afghanistan.
The 2014 school assault deeply shocked Pakistan, and since then the TTP has vowed only to target state security forces.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only nations in the world where wild polio is still endemic.
Polio vaccination teams are routinely escorted by police in the western regions, and the TTP has made a habit of ambushing officers as they travel into those restive remote areas.