BARA:
At least 17 militants from the Lashkar-e-Islam (LeI) extremist group were killed on Saturday when security forces successfully fought back an attack on a check post in Bara tehsil of Khyber Agency where a security operation, Khyber-I, has been ongoing since mid-October. Elsewhere in the restive agency, two volunteers of a peace committee were killed in a bomb attack.
“Fifty to 60 militants, armed with sophisticated weapons, attacked the security forces’ check post in the Speen Qamar on the night between Friday and Saturday,” the military media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), said in a statement.
“The attack was valiantly repulsed and the terrorists ran away, leaving behind 17 bodies [of their comrades],” it added. The bodies were later shifted to a compound of the security forces. Officially, there was no word on the identity of the dead militants. Tribal and official sources, however, believe they were members of Mangal Bagh’s Lashkar-e-Islam group.
Meanwhile, two volunteers of Zakhakhel tribe’s peace committee were killed in a home-made bomb attack in the Narai Baba area of Bazaar, which is the gateway to the rest of the inaccessible Tirah Valley. The Zakhakhels, the second biggest sub-clan of the Afridi tribe, have been leading local resistance against the Lashkar-e-Islam for the last three years.
The tribe has formed peace committees or Aman Lashkars to aid the government’s effort to cleanse the area of militants who have unleashed a reign of terror in the region. Members of these Amn Lashkars have frequently been attacked by militants. Since the launch of operation Khyber-I, there have been over a dozen attacks on the checkpoints and pickets of Amn Lashkars.
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Pervaiz Khattak strongly condemned Saturday’s bomb attack on the Zakhakhel peace committee as a ‘dastardly act of saboteurs’. In a statement, he also denounced Friday’s twin bomb attacks on the Safi peace committee in Mohmand Agency which left seven people dead, including two close relatives of the committee’s leader.
He said the security forces with the help of the valiant tribesmen would frustrate the nefarious designs of terrorists who were perpetrating heinous crimes against innocent people.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 9th, 2014.
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