Militants in Afghanistan strike Pakistan post, kill 3

ISLAMABAD — Militants in Afghanistan fired heavy weapons across the border into a Pakistani military outpost overnight, killing three personnel, the army said Saturday, in the latest violence to rattle the volatile region.

A battle ensued with the militants firing toward the army post in Pakistan’s rugged North Waziristan region, and several were killed, the statement said. There was no immediate way to independently confirm details of the attack.

It comes as Afghanistan is reeling from a series of explosions in recent days, including the bombing of a mosque in northern Kunduz province on Friday that killed 33 people, including several students of an adjacent religious school.

The attacks include an assault Thursday on the Abdul Rahim Shaheed school in Kabul that killed seven children. It re-opened on Saturday, with children remembering their fallen classmates with roses.

The striking increase in attacks in Afghanistan — as well as in neighboring Pakistan — highlights the growing security challenge facing Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, who swept to power last August in the closing days of the chaotic withdrawal of American and NATO troops ending their 20-year war.

Even as their harsh religiously motivated edicts, which seemed reminiscent of their late 1990s rule, drew harsh criticism, their seemingly heavyhanded approach to security brought early expectations of improved safety. However a vicious Islamic State affiliate known as the Islamic State in Khorasn Province, or IS-K — which claimed the recent spate of attacks in Afghanistan as well as a growing number in neighboring Pakistan — is proving an intractable challenge.

Still, the IS-K, which is an enemy of Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, is not the only militant organization in Afghanistan contributing to the security dilemma facing Kabul’s religiously driven government. The violent Pakistani Taliban, known as the Tehreek-e-Taliban

Pakistan or TTP — which the United Nations says numbers around 10,000 in Afghanistan — has stepped up its assault on Pakistan’s military outposts from its Afghan hideouts.

Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have promised no militant group would use its soil as a base to attack another country, but Kabul has yet to arrest or hand over any TTP leaders in Afghanistan to Pakistan.