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Insurgents Attack Pakistani Airport Again Amid Military Raids Taliban Attack Pakistani Airport Again Amid Military Raids
(about 5 hours later)
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Insurgents attacked an airport training facility in Karachi, Pakistan, on Tuesday, two days after the Taliban carried out a daring raid on Karachi’s international airport. The latest attack came as the Pakistani military carried out airstrikes on nine militant hide-outs in a remote valley in the northwestern Khyber tribal region. LONDON — Retaliating against a new wave of military airstrikes, Taliban gunmen on Tuesday attacked security forces at Karachi’s international airport for the second time in two days, underscoring their capacity to create mayhem in Pakistan’s largest city.
In another development, the death toll from Sunday’s attack on the airport rose to at least 36, as the charred bodies of at least seven people were recovered from a cold-storage unit at the airport on Tuesday. The attack, in which at least two gunmen opened fire on a guard post at the airport perimeter, caused no casualties and ended with the gunmen’s fleeing into a nearby slum. By contrast, at least 37 people died in the earlier attack on Sunday, which lasted through the night.
Initial reports suggested that the two attackers, riding motorbikes, tried to enter the training facility from a nearby slum but faced stiff resistance from the guards manning the outer boundary wall of the complex, which houses a training academy and lodging for security officers. Still, all flight operations at the airport, Pakistan’s busiest, were suspended in the wake of the latest attack, according to the civil aviation authority. But the latest attack did cause Jinnah International Airport, Pakistan’s biggest airfield, to temporarily close for the second time in 48 hours. And as it came hours after Pakistani air force jets struck militant targets in the tribal belt, it compounded the sense that Pakistan’s war against the Taliban was rapidly escalating.
As airport security forces took up positions, many of them moved out of the training facility and toward the edges of the slum. Several television journalists also tried to move in the same direction as bursts of gunfire echoed in the background. “The military wants to sort the Taliban out as soon as possible,” said Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Center for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. “They want to set things right in the tribal areas.”
An airport security official, Col. Tahir Ali, played down the violence, saying that only two attackers engaged the security guards with gunfire. In Tuesday’s attack, at least two attackers opened fire on a security post manned by the Airport Security Force, a paramilitary force that guards the Karachi airport and that lost at least 11 members in the Taliban’s previous assault. The shooting occurred on the perimeter of the force’s training and residential complex, which is beside the airport, barely a mile from the main terminal.
“It was not an attack as such,” Colonel Ali said. “They came and fired. We cannot take any risk. We will try to contain them immediately.” Guards at the checkpoint returned fire, and the attackers fled into a nearby slum area, where they were pursued by paramilitary troops who rushed to the scene of the attack. Several television journalists followed the soldiers into the slum, drawing criticism on social media from Pakistanis who blamed them for endangering the operation.
He said a search was underway for the suspects in the slum. No one was injured in the gun battle, he said. A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attack within hours, calling it retaliation for Pakistani military airstrikes in the northwestern mountains earlier that morning. “We are back to A.S.F. academy,” said the spokesman, Omar Khorasani, referring to the Airport Security Force, via a Twitter account that is believed to be his own.
Omar Khorasani, a Taliban official, said on his Twitter account that his group carried out Tuesday’s attack. With Karachi beset by a sense of nervous uncertainty since Sunday’s attack, senior security officials tried to play down the incident. “It was not an attack as such,” said Col. Tahir Ali. “They came and fired. We cannot take any risk.”
The escalating conflict came as peace talks between the Taliban and the Pakistani government have broken down, leading the Pakistani military to stage a series of raids on insurgent hide-outs. Flights to and from Karachi were suspended after the attack on Tuesday morning – local news media reported that a plane from Dubai was forced to turn back over the Arabian Sea – but resumed later in the day.
Pakistani military officials did not immediately confirm that Tuesday’s airstrikes were meant to retaliate for the weekend raid on the airport. Security officials said at least 25 militants had been killed in the raids. None of the international airlines flying to Karachi have announced any change to their service, but several said they were watching the situation.
In Sunday’s airport attack, a squad of militant commandos came equipped with food, water and ammunition, apparently in preparation for a long siege. Government officials said they may have been trying to hijack a commercial airliner, blow up an oil depot or destroy airplanes on the tarmac. Tuesday’s military strikes targeted militant compounds in the Tirah Valley, a remote part of the Khyber tribal district, along the border with Afghanistan, where the Taliban has allied with Mangal Bagh, a local warlord.
But the 10 attackers were dead five hours later, shot by soldiers or blown up by their own suicide vests. The Taliban also claimed responsibility for that attack. The alliance concerns the Pakistani military because of Tirah’s proximity to the historic Khyber Pass, a major border crossing with Afghanistan, and the army has mounted several attacks on Taliban positions in the Khyber district so far this year.
Officials said Monday that at least 19 other people, including security forces and four employees of Pakistan International Airlines, the state carrier, were killed. But the recovery of the charred bodies from the airport’s cold-storage area on Tuesday led to outrage and condemnation by distraught relatives, the local news media reported. A military spokesman said that 25 militants had been killed in the airstrikes, but there was no independent confirmation of the toll.
One day earlier, the government had declared that the airport had been cleared and was fit for the resumption of flights. The discovery of the additional bodies raised questions about the extent of damage and death that the authorities have reported. Mr. Gul, the analyst, said the airstrikes offered further proof that the military was preparing for a concerted operation against the Taliban in their tribal belt havens. “There is going to be a crackdown against those people who are identified as enemies,” he said.
The seven people, who worked for a private cargo firm, hid in the cold-storage area as a battle raged between the attackers and security forces late Sunday. The cause of their deaths is under investigation. Pakistan’s definition of an enemy has become harder to define, however, since a split in the Taliban leadership last month. Mr. Gul said an army offensive would be tacitly supported by three significant militant factions in North Waziristan, including one commanded by a breakaway Taliban commander known as Sajna.
Shahzad Humayoon, whose brother Fareed Khan was one of the seven, said that the authorities had retrieved the bodies only after a protest Monday night by relatives who blocked the city’s main thoroughfare, Shahrah-e-Faisal, which connects the airport to the city. Their declared enemy now, he said, was a group of militant “irreconcilables” headed by the leader of the remnant Pakistani Taliban, Maulana Fazlullah, and warlords like Mr. Bagh.
Pakistan’s sudden haste in confronting the Taliban stems from the effective collapse of peace talks led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government, but may also have a geostrategic dimension.
Pakistan has come under increasing pressure from China to deal with ethnic Uighur and Uzbek militant leaders who are hiding in the tribal belt and support an Islamist insurgency in western China.
China is a major strategic and economic partner for Pakistan, and now the government realizes that “if it wants to protect Pakistan’s interests, it needs to protect Chinese interests,” Mr. Gul said.
As well, the infighting and conflicting aims and allies among various Taliban factions have raised tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan. On Tuesday, the Afghan Foreign Ministry reported that the Pakistani government had summoned the Afghan ambassador in Islamabad, Janan Mosazai, to complain because some of the Pakistani Taliban’s leadership is in eastern Afghanistan.
As the investigation of the Taliban attacks in Karachi continued on Tuesday, the authorities recovered at least seven charred bodies of cargo workers from a cold-storage unit where they had tried to hide on Sunday night.
The seven men worked for Gerry’s Dnata, a private cargo handling business based in the United Arab Emirates, and had fled into the storage area at the start of the firefight between security forces and militants on Sunday night. Younas Khan, a local trade union leader, said in an interview that the men had been in continuous telephone contact with him until about 3 a.m. on Monday.
But a fierce blaze swept through the cargo building during the fight. The authorities say they are investigating who started it. The following day, after the security services conducting a sweep of the complex, the airport was reopened to commercial flights.
Tuesday’s discovery of more bodies, which brought the death toll to 37, including 10 attackers, raised new questions about the extent of damage that has been reported by the authorities.