Suicide bomber targets Pakistani Army in Kashmir

A suicide bomber killed three security personnel as he attempted to get inside an Army barracks in the Tararrkhal region in Pakistan-held Kashmir.

Security personnel stopped the suicide bomber before he could enter the base. Fourteen others were wounded in the attack.

The suicide attack is the fourth recorded since June 2009. Prior to June 2009, were no suicide attacks recorded in Pakistan-held Kashmir.

In June 2009, two Pakistani soldiers were killed and three more were wounded in a suicide attack on a military convoy in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-held Kashmir.

The next attack took place in Muzaffarabad in November 2009, when police launched a manhunt for terrorists. Three men fled from police and at least two of them blew themselves up before they could be captured.

At the end of December 2009, a suicide bomber killed 15 Shia worshippers and wounded 100 more in an attack on a procession in Muzaffarabad. Two policemen were among those killed.

Pakistani Kashmir has been used as a training ground and launchpad for jihadi attacks into Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir. Terror groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Harakat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, and the Harakat-ul-Mujahideen have thrived in Pakistan-held Kashmir with the support of the Pakistani state and the military. Their aim is to agitate a rebellion in Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir, as well as to hammer Indian military personnel in the region and conduct terror attacks inside India proper.

Until recently, the Pakistani jihadi groups had refrained from conducting attacks in Pakistan-held Kashmir. The emergence of attacks in Kashmir indicates that the Pakistani jihadi groups, which have allied closely with the Taliban in the northwest, are expanding their terror campaign against the Pakistani state in Kashmir.

The Taliban have been waging a terror campaign against the Pakistani state, with suicide attacks and complex assaults on military, police, and intelligence headquarters, as well as attacks on civilians, nongovernmental organizations, and religious services.

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.

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5 Comments

  • singh says:

    History is full of examples where a pliant ‘tool’ turns on his masters and (tries to) kill(s) them. A case in point are the jihadis- trained by the Pakistan army primarily as an instrument to serve Pakistani foreign policy (while murdering kafir Indians, a win-win for all), they are now doing to Pakistanis what they till very recently did to the Indians. The only suicide attacks in Kashmir used to be carried out on Indian forces. From an Indian perspective, it is a modified version of the Spy vs Spy comic strip in Mad magazine; except here it is jihadi (in mufti) vs jihadi (in fatigues).

  • sanjith menon says:

    Shows the extreme desperation of militants.

  • trickey says:

    They are only responding to their presidents call for “fight in Kashmir”. I suppose Zardari should have been a little more explicit about which part of Kashmir

  • ratee says:

    Talk about your own CIA and USA you trained the mujhaideen why blame on the agents only?
    Look yourself in the mirror as well please!!!

  • mike says:

    We shouldn’t have intervened in the middles east in the 30’s. That’s the root of the problem i believe

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