The Pakistan Air Force bombed several targets of Baluchi armed organizations inside Iran on Thursday, causing at least nine deaths. The operation is a symmetrical response to the intrusion of Iranian drones into Pakistani territory on Tuesday night, which left at least two civilians dead. Tehran also claims that its target was a Beluchi terrorist organization, in its case anti-Shiite.
At the moment it is Beluchi secessionism, on both sides of the border, that is causing the deaths in this unprecedented fight between both armies. However, 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 in the next few hours of massive military maneuvers by its three armies, from the Persian Gulf to the port of Chabahar, less than one hundred kilometers from the Pakistani border.
The Pakistani Foreign Ministry reported this Thursday in a statement that several militants of the Baloch Liberation Army and the Baloch Liberation Front were killed during the bombings, which hit insurgent hideouts in the Iranian province of Sistan and Balochistan, adjacent to the Pakistani province of Balochistan. . Islamabad, like Tehran, justifies its aggression by the neighbor’s passivity in the face of preparations for attacks on the other side of the border against its armed and police forces.
Shortly afterward, Iran confirmed the Pakistani bombings, in which “four children, three women and two men, none of them Iranian nationals,” were reported to have died, according to the official IRNA agency.
The bombings took place at 6:30 a.m. Pakistani time. One of the villages in the area was hit by several shells, causing several victims, while another fell near the city of Saravan without causing damage.
As noted, these attacks occur after Iran attacked two bases of the Sunni terrorist group Yeish al Adl in Pakistan last Tuesday with missiles and drones, in which two children died, according to Islamabad, which warned of “serious consequences”. Hours later, the answer came. The Yeish al Adl, a rebel militia that claims to fight for the independence of Balochistan, claimed responsibility for the murder in the provincial capital, Zahedan, of a colonel of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hossein Ali Javadan, and his two bodyguards. Iran denounces that behind this curious jihadist and anti-Shiite mutation of Beluchi secessionism – traditionally secular and left-wing – is the hand of Israel and the United States.
Hence, 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 to groups associated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State – among them, Uyghur militants – and in the second, against an alleged Mossad antenna, with the result of four Israeli agents, according to unconfirmed Iranian information. of a Kurdish potentate and his months-old daughter.
The Iranian offensive against Yaish al Adl (or Army of Justice) hit the town of Koh-i-Sabaz – in Pakistani Balochistan, 50 kilometers from the border, resulting in four civilian deaths, including children, according to Islamabad, while Tehran considers having razed the operations center of the armed organization. This Sunni extremist group, classified as “terrorist” by the United States, exhausted Tehran’s patience last month with an attack in which eleven of its soldiers died, in Sistan and Balochistan.
Both Yaish al Adl and the Baluchi Liberation Army say they defend the cause of the independence of Balochistan, an immense, desert and sparsely populated territory but with a lot of natural gas, distributed between Iran, Pakistan and the extreme south of Afghanistan. Both have specialized in murdering soldiers and police, in Iranian uniform, in the first case, and Pakistani, in the second. The latter would have the support of the Indian secret services, as Pakistan repeatedly denounces, which in turn supports the independentists in the Kashmir valley, under Indian control.
Pakistan, for its part, has taken the opportunity to strike at a time when there are rumored rapprochement movements between several historical factions of Baluchi secessionism. A significant stone in China’s path, which has the corridor under construction that goes from Xinjian to the port of Gwadar, through Kashmir under Pakistani control and Balochistan, to approach the Arabian Sea.
The Iranian aggression on Tuesday took by surprise the interim government of Pakistan, whose sole objective is to prepare for the general elections to be held in three weeks, which it is not attending. The interim nature of the Pakistani moment has been shrewdly taken advantage of by Iran, which the day before was carrying out joint naval maneuvers with the Pakistani navy.
The Pakistani interim prime minister, Anwar ul-Haq Kakar, has had to cut short his visit to the Davos forum, but not before calling the ambassador in Tehran for consultations. Likewise, the Iranian ambassador in Islamabad, who was in his country, will not be able to set foot in Pakistan again. It so happens that Kakar had just met in Davos with the Iranian Foreign Minister, a few hours before the combined attack of Iranian missiles and drones on targets in Pakistani Balochistan.
Even Pakistan’s foreign minister was outside the country, in Uganda, at a summit of non-aligned countries. His Iranian counterpart, Hosein Amir Abdolahian, defended the operation on his part, alleging that it was not directed against Pakistani citizens, but rather against Iranian terrorists stationed in Pakistani territory.
It should be noted that Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty was routinely violated during Barak Obama’s government, when US drone attacks on Pashtun insurgency positions, particularly in Waziristan, numbered in the hundreds, leaving at least 801 dead, according to estimates. Americans, several times more according to Islamabad. The reprisals, then, were barely verbal.
On the other hand, the current display of ballistic capabilities by Iran, 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 in Sanaa, have put international shipping traffic in check, in solidarity with Palestine. The paradoxical side effect is that precisely two of the greatest powers that refuse to recognize Israel – while hosting Palestinian ambassadors – now challenge each other to the face of a dog. Although the victims, civilians or not, are for the moment put by the Beluchis.
A no small paradox is that it has to be the Taliban Foreign Ministry, through its spokesperson, who calls for calm to its neighbors. The Turkish Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, has also contacted his Pakistani and Iranian counterparts, stating that neither party wants the crisis to escalate. Pakistan, let us not forget, is a nuclear power.
(Below, images of the damage caused by the Pakistani bombing against targets in Sistan and Balochistan)
