QUETTA, Pakistan — Four people were killed
and 27 injured Wednesday when a suicide bomber targeted a police truck in
western Pakistan, an attack claimed by the domestic chapter of the Taliban.
اضافة اعلان
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), separate from the
Afghan Taliban but sharing a common hardline Islamist ideology, earlier this
week called off a shaky months-long ceasefire agreed with Islamabad and ordered
its fighters to resume attacks across the nation.
Senior police official Azhar Mehesar told AFP that
Wednesday’s blast targeted a security force in a truck preparing to escort
polio vaccinators in the city of Quetta.
Wasim Baig, spokesman for the provincial health
department, told AFP a policeman, a civilian woman, and two children had been
killed.
“The injured include 21 policemen and two children,”
he said.
In a statement, the TTP said a “warrior” detonated a
car bomb near a customs post to avenge the killing of founding member Umar
Khalid Khurasani during the truce.
“Our revenge operations will continue,” the
statement added.
The blast left the canvas-topped police truck lying
on its side by the road.
Scraps of metal littered the scene, with another
vehicle — presumed to have been used in the attack — reduced to a charred
tangle.
The TTP was founded in 2007 by
Pakistani terrorists
who fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s before opposing
Islamabad’s support for the US-led intervention there after September 11, 2001.
For a time they held vast tracts of Pakistan’s
rugged tribal belt, imposing a radical interpretation of Islamic law and
patrolling territory just 140km from the Pakistan capital.
School attack
The Pakistani military came down hard after 2014 when TTP militants raided
a school for children of army personnel and killed nearly 150 people, most of
them pupils.
Its fighters were
largely routed into neighboring Afghanistan, but Islamabad claims the Taliban
in Kabul are now giving the TTP a foothold to stage assaults across the border.
In the year since
the Taliban returned to power in
Afghanistan, Pakistan has seen a 50 percent
surge in militant attacks, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies
(PIPS).
Most of these
attacks have been focused in the western provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and
Balochistan, which neighbor Afghanistan.
The 2014 school
assault deeply shocked Pakistan, and since then the TTP have vowed only to
target state security forces.
Afghanistan and
Pakistan are the only nations in the world where polio is endemic.
There is resistance
to vaccine campaigns in rural areas and among conservative communities who
falsely believe they are an effort to sterilize them.
Polio vaccination
teams are routinely escorted by police in the western regions, and the TTP has
regularly ambushed officers in remote restive areas.
Pakistan officials
on Monday launched a week-long immunization campaign aiming to inoculate over
13 million children living in “high-risk districts”.
In April, Pakistan
reported its first case of polio in 15 months. Since then 20 cases have been
reported, according to the government-funded End Polio Pakistan program.
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