Pakistan urges the Afghan Taliban to forestall militants from crossing the border and staging assaults

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s prime minister on Tuesday requested neighboring Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to do extra to forestall militants from crossing the border to stage assaults comparable to the large suicide bombing earlier this week that killed dozens in a border area.

The enchantment got here days after the bomber struck an election marketing campaign rally of supporters of a pro-Taliban cleric on Sunday, killing dozens and wounding scores within the district of Bajur. The demise toll from the bombing rose to 55 on Tuesday, after a critically wounded particular person died in a hospital within the northwestern metropolis of Peshawar, hospital officers and the federal government mentioned.

An Afghan-based department of the Islamic State group has claimed accountability for the Bajur assault. IS militants are Taliban rivals and have stepped up assaults because the Taliban seized energy in Afghanistan in August 2021.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif mentioned the militants discover sanctuaries inside Afghanistan, regroup and rearm there, and subsequently infiltrate Pakistan the place they perform anti-government assaults.

The Afghan Taliban authorities “should undertake concrete measures toward denying their soil be used for transnational terrorism,” he mentioned whereas visiting a number of the wounded in a Peshawar hospital.

The bomber focused a rally of the novel Jamiat Ulema Islam occasion, which is a part of Sharif’s coalition authorities and likewise has ties to the Afghan Taliban. The occasion has a robust following in northwestern Pakistan.

The U.N. Security Council strongly condemned the suicide bombing in Bajur and “terrorism in all its forms and manifestations,” describing it as “one of the most serious threats to international peace and security.” Members of the council known as for the perpetrators to be held accountable and for different international locations to cooperate with Pakistan on the matter.

Northwestern Pakistan was previously a militant stronghold till successive army operations claimed to have routed militants from there, together with the Pakistani Taliban, a separate group however allied wiith the Afghan Taliban. The group is often known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP.

The Bajur bombing was the most recent in a number of big assaults over the previous years. A Taliban assault on an army-run college in Peshawar in 2014 killed 147 individuals, principally schoolchildren. In January, 74 individuals had been killed in a bombing at a mosque in Peshawar. And in February, greater than 100 individuals, principally policemen, died in a mosque bombing inside Pesharwar police headquarters.

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