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Pakistan carried out a pre-dawn attack on suspected militant bases in Iran on Thursday, a retaliatory strike that threatens to escalate tensions after Iran attacked a jihadi group in Pakistan this week.
Pakistan’s foreign ministry said in a statement that it “undertook a series of highly co-ordinated and specifically targeted precision military strikes against terrorist hide-outs” in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province on Thursday morning, killing a number of militants.
Sistan-Baluchestan has long been a base for separatist groups fighting an insurgency against the Pakistani state.
The foreign ministry added that it carried out the strikes because Iran had failed to act on “serious concerns about the safe havens and sanctuaries enjoyed by Pakistani origin terrorists” who had “continued to spill the blood of innocent Pakistanis with impunity”.
Iran confirmed that Pakistan had launched several missiles on an Iranian border village at 4:30am local time. The attack killed four children and three women who were foreign nationals, a deputy to the governor of Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan, Alireza Rahmati, told state television.
He said there was “another explosion” near the border town of Saravan which had no casualties.
Thursday’s strike follows an attack by Iran on a Pakistan-based jihadi group on Tuesday, which targeted Koh-e-Sabz near the town of Panjgur in the neighbouring Pakistani province of Balochistan. The Jaish ul-Adl, a Sunni militant group, has waged an armed campaign against Tehran from Balochistan.
The military escalation between Iran and Pakistan has prompted alarm that tensions across the region are escalating, after war broke out in October between Israel and Hamas.
Pakistan and Iran have long complained that separatists are able to use each other’s soil to launch cross-border attacks.
Iran’s strikes this week followed similar operations by its elite Revolutionary Guard in Iraq and Syria in response to a suicide bombing in the southern city of Kerman, for which terror group Isis took responsibility.
Iranian media said Tehran demanded an “immediate explanation” from Islamabad.