Vicious cycle of terror: Bomb targeting football fans kills 5 in Orakzai

Uzbeks among 10 militants killed in US drone strike in North Waziristan’s Datta Khel area

ORAKZAI AGENCY:

A homemade bomb targeting football fans went off at a playground in Kalaya, the headquarters of the Orakzai tribal region, late Sunday evening, killing at least five people. Elsewhere in the tribal belt, 10 suspected militants were killed in a US drone strike in North Waziristan Agency on Sunday.

A huge crowd had turned up to watch a football match between local teams on Kado Bazaar playground when an improvised explosive device (IED) was detonated by suspected militants.

Survivors ferried the casualties to the Agency Headquarters Hospital Kalaya. Some of the injured with life-threatening wounds were shifted to hospitals in nearby Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa districts of Hangu and Kohat. Officials of the local political administration said the IED was planted near the boundary wall of the playground.

K-P Governor Sardar Mahtab Ahmad Khan condemned the attack and expressed sorrow over the loss of innocent lives. He said the terrorists involved in this heinous crime would be brought to justice.

Orakzai Agency shares a border with the restive Khyber Agency where security forces have been fighting militants from the Mangal Bagh-led Lashkar-e-Islam extremist group and Tehreek-e-Taliban  Pakistan since mid-October. The militants are said to be holed up in the remote Tirah Valley of Khyber which also shares a border with Afghanistan.

Separately, at least 10 suspected militants were killed and several others injured in a US drone strike in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan Agency where a military operation, codenamed Zarb-e-Azb, has been ongoing since mid-June.

A remotely piloted US aircraft fired two missiles at a compound of suspected militants in the Alwara Mandi area, sited on the Pak-Afghan border, officials said. The missiles flattened the compound which, according to local tribesmen, belonged to militants loyal to local warlord Hafiz Gul Bahadur.

Gul Bahadur, a close ally of the Haqqani Network of the Afghan Taliban, was not present in the compound at the time of the drone strike. Three of the victims were said to be Uzbek fighters while the rest could not be identified immediately.

It was the first US drone strike of 2015. Last year, there had been 20 such missile attacks in the Waziristan region – 17 in North Waziristan and three in South Waziristan. A number of key al Qaeda figures and Taliban fighters had been killed in these attacks.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 6^th, 2014.