At least nine people have been killed after Pakistan said it used “killer” drones and rockets in a retaliatory strike on Iranian territory on Thursday.
Iranian media said several missiles hit a village in the Sistan Baluchistan province bordering Pakistan, with four children amongst the dead.
“A number of terrorists were killed during the intelligence-based operation,” Pakistan’s foreign ministry said.
It described the airstrikes as a “series of highly co-ordinated and specifically targeted precision military strikes against terrorist hideouts”.
“The sole objective of today’s act was in pursuit of Pakistan’s own security and national interest, which is paramount and cannot be compromised,” the ministry added.
In a statement, the country’s military said: “The precision strikes were carried out using killer drones, rockets, loitering munitions and stand-off weapons.”
It said the targets were based used by the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF) and the Baloch Liberation Army.
Pakistan’s caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-haq Kakar will cut short a visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos following the strikes, a foreign ministry spokesman said.
Iran has condemned the airstrikes, saying those killed were civilians, and has summoned Pakistan’s charge d’affaires to explain the action.
Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi told state TV that “four children, three women and two men, who were foreign nationals, have been killed”.
The attack follows Iran’s strikes on Tuesday on Pakistani soil that killed two children in the southwestern Baluchistan province.
But while the seeming tit-for-tat exchange has stoked local tensions and spread fears of a wider regional conflict breaking out from Israel’s war in Gaza, both sides have targeted the same group of insurgents, located on either side of their mutual border.
On Tuesday, Iran targeted Jaish al Adl, or the Army of Justice, an outlawed Sunni Muslim separatist group, which is anti-Iranian and seeks independence for Iran’s eastern Sistan and Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan provinces, making it a common target for both governments.
There has been a low-level insurgency by nationalists for more than two decades, and like other Baluchi separatist active groups in the area, Jaish al Adl has a common goal of an independent Baluchistan for ethnic Baluch areas in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.
The Pakistani strikes are the latest in a number of attacks on foreign soil in the last week or so.
Overnight, the US attacked Houthi positions in Yemen for a fourth time in less than a week, after another American-owned vessel was attacked near the Red Sea.
Fourteen missile sites were targeted at around 11.59pm local time on Wednesday, said US Central Command.
After the latest strikes, Turkey’s foreign ministry called for Iran, Iraq and Pakistan to show restraint and common sense after an escalation of tensions.
The Taliban, which controls Afghanistan, also called on Iran and Pakistan to resolve their differences through “diplomacy and dialogue”.
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