A Taliban suicide bomber detonated outside the headquarters of the Pakistani Navy in Islamabad, killing one security guard and critically wounding two others, in the latest attack against the military.
The teenaged suicide bomber detonated his bomb as he was being searched at a checkpoint at the front gate of the Navy Headquarters.
“The bomber was about 17 to 18 years old,” Fazeel Asghar, the senior administrative official in Islamabad told Dawn. “He was wearing a suicide jacket. He came to the gate and tried to enter the complex.”
“Security officials checked him and one navy police constable, Mohammad Ashraf, asked him to take off his coat,” Asghar continued. “The bomber then blew himself up and the navy constable died in the blast.”
The Taliban and allied Pakistani jihadi groups have conducted multiple attacks against military and police headquarters over the past year. Since Oct. 5, when the Taliban launched their terror campaign, they have conducted a military assault on the Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi and against police centers in Lahore, and destroyed the headquarters of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency’s counterterrorism unit in Peshawar.
Today’s suicide attack in Islamabad is the second in two days. Yesterday a suicide bomber in Swat killed a member of the provincial assembly of the Northwest Frontier Province. The assembly member was on a Taliban hit list issued in the spring by Swat Taliban leader Mullah Fazlullah.
Also yesterday, the Taliban assassinated three tribal leaders in the tribal agency of Arakzai, and another in the district of Swabi. The Taliban are attempting to smash any tribal resistance to their movement in the Northwest.
4 Comments
The United States and her allies make it almost a strategic mission to not discern between elements within the Taliban. True, the US at one point was reaching out to “pragmatic” facets of the Taliban coalition, but the most recent address by President Obama (Westpoint, NY) grouped all Taliban into one pot.
I find reading articles, and journal entries a bit frustrating because through the rhetoric it would appear, superficially, that the Taliban who attacked the Naval Outpost and the Taliban who attacked ISI in Peshawar, and the Taliban who recieve aid (whether it be warning of an impending attack, or resources) from the ISI and Pakistani Military are all the same.
To me, at least, this produces a contradiction of details.
Pak military establishment are using Islamic Militants like Talibans to achieve their foreign policy objectives. But running this venture of terrorism is not easy task for Pak military. They discard some of these groups once in a while which go ashtray & attack Pak military for revenge. In general Pak military & militants are one of the same. Dismentalling one of them will not help, they both need to be dismantled for the world at large to have good night sleep without terrorist.
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 12/02/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
MalangJan, i commend you for your candidness and the sane voice with which you speak.
The Pak military is the singularly important factor for the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, leading to the length of this war.
Being part of the problem, it is very difficult to see how they can suddenly become part of the solution. And one has not been impressed by their S Waz operation where they were unable/unwilling to block the mehsuds escape routes. The Army is essentially chasing its own tail.