The Pakistan Army on Thursday reported an operation in South Waziristan, near the border with Afghanistan, that has left eight Pakistani Taliban dead, in response to an attack in the same region claimed by the Islamists last week in which four policemen were killed.
The heavy firefight has also left one soldier dead. According to the Army, the hostilities began when they raided one of the hideouts that Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban, has in the mountainous region of South Waziristan last night.
The offensive comes a week after a Pakistani Taliban bomb attack on a police car in the same region, which left four people dead, and is part of a surge in operations against the group following a January suicide attack on a mosque in Peshawar, which killed 84 people.
Over the past decade, the Pakistani Taliban have killed some 80,000 people. While they have had to flee in recent years from their main strongholds in the regions bordering Afghanistan in the face of the advancing military, with the arrival of their Afghan counterparts in power they are trying to regroup again.
The TTP group, which differs from the Afghan Taliban in organizational matters but follows the same rigorist interpretation of Sunni Islam, brings together more than a dozen Islamist militant groups operating in Pakistan.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
