SOUTH WAZIRISTAN/KHYBER: At least Seven people, including four Frontier Corps personnel, lost their lives in three attacks across South Waziristan Upper and Tirah in Khyber.

In South Waziristan Upper, a bomb disposal vehicle of the security forces was attacked with an improvised explosive device (IED) in the Karam area of tehsil Ladha. The IED was followed by shooting. As a result, four FC men were martyred and five others wounded, sources told Dawn.

Two of the injured personnel were in critical condition and shifted to Scouts Hospital in Wana. “Security forces cordoned off the area immediately and launched a search operation,” sources said. There was no official statement by the military’s media wing till this report went to press.

In a separate incident, militants targeted a vehicle in the Daza Ghundai area. As a result, a Counter-Terrorism Department official was martyred and two civilians were wounded.

In Khyber’s Tirah Valley, two children were killed and five were injured when a mortar shell, fired from an unknown location, landed in the area.

Sources said that a group of students of a government primary school, Hashim Khan Kalay in the Bhutan Shareef area of Bar Qambar Khel were on their way home when a mortar fired from an undisclosed direction hit the nearby houses and a mosque.

They said that while the mortar shell caused a fire in some houses and the mosque in the Sra Cheena locality, the shrapnel hit six school children, injuring them critically while a girl was also injured in the fire.

Residents of Bhutan Shareef, near the border with Orakzai district, said that 10-year-old Abidullah and his sister Kulsoom succumbed to injuries while on their way to hospital in Peshawar. Other injured students were shifted to hospital, with most of them having injuries on their faces.

Although there was no immediate confirmation about who fired the mortar shell, there were speculations from some official quarters that two rival groups of the banned TTP were at war in the area and they had been targeting each other’s positions with heavy weapons.

Local sources could not be approached to confirm the veracity of these reports.

It may be noted that a quadcopter attack on October 21 in the Peer Mela area of Tirah injured at least 15 persons, mostly children who were later shifted to Peshawar for treatment.

Published in Dawn, November 7th, 2024