The Pakistan Air Force yesterday bombed several targets of Baloch armed organizations inside Iran, and has caused at least nine deaths. The operation was a symmetrical response to the intrusion of Iranian drones into Pakistani territory on Tuesday night, which left at least two civilians dead. Tehran also asserts that its target was a Baluchi terrorist organization, in its case an anti-Shia sign.
At the moment it is Baloch secessionism, on both sides of the border, that is putting the dead in this unprecedented pulse between the two armies. Nevertheless, China has been quick to call its two allies, Pakistan and Iran, to restraint. Islamabad has already warned that its armed forces are “on high alert” and will not tolerate any further provocation. Iran, for its part, has announced the start of massive military maneuvers of its three armies, from the Persian Gulf to the port of Chabahar, less than a hundred kilometers from the Pakistani border.
The Pakistani Foreign Ministry reported yesterday that several militants of the Baloch Liberation Army and the Baloch Liberation Front were killed during the bombings, which rocked insurgent hideouts in the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchistan, adjacent to the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. Islamabad, like Tehran, justifies the aggression by citing its neighbor’s passivity in the face of preparations for attacks on the other side of the border. Iran confirmed shortly after the Pakistani bombings, in which “four children, three women and two men, none of them of Iranian nationality” would have died, according to the official IRNA agency.
These attacks come after Iran attacked two bases of the Sunni terrorist group Jaish al-Adl on Tuesday with missiles and drones in which two children were killed, according to Islamabad, which warned of “serious consequences”. Hours later, Jaish al-Adl, a rebel militia that says it is fighting for the independence of Baluchistan, claimed responsibility for the killing in the provincial capital, Zahedan, of a colonel of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hussein Ali Javadan, and his two bodyguards Iran denounces that Israel and the
That is why the operation in Pakistani Balochistan took place almost simultaneously with other Iranian bombings against the portion of Syria under jihadist control and against Iraqi Kurdistan. In the first case, as punishment for groups associated with Al-Qaida and the Islamic State, and in the second, against an alleged Mossad antenna, with the result of four Israeli agents, according to Iranian information, in addition to one Kurdish potentate and his months-old daughter.
The Iranian offensive against Jaish al-Adl (or Army of Justice) raged on the village of Koh-e-Sabaz – in Pakistani Baluchistan, 50 kilometers from the border – with the result of four civilian deaths, including children, according to Islamabad. Tehran says it has leveled the organization’s operations center. This Sunni extremist group ended Tehran’s patience last month with an attack that killed 11 soldiers in Sistan and Baluchistan.
Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty was routinely violated during the administration of Barak Obama, when US drone strikes on Pashtun insurgent positions, particularly in Waziristan, numbered in the hundreds, killing at least 801 people, according to estimates Americans, more according to Islamabad. The reprisals, then, were barely verbal.
The current display of Iran’s ballistic capabilities, with a deterrent objective, cannot be separated from the Israeli military operation in Gaza – with more than twenty thousand civilian deaths – and the naval movements in the Red Sea, where the Houthis, their Yemeni allies, have endangered international shipping traffic, in solidarity with Palestine. The paradoxical side effect is that two of the biggest powers that refuse to recognize Israel are now challenging each other. Although the casualties, civilian or otherwise, are put by the Balochis for now.