No fewer than nine people, including four children, three women, and two men were killed in Thursday morning’s raids on Iranian territory.
Gatekeepers News reports that Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi disclosed this to Iranian state television.
The Thursday attack was a retaliatory attack by Pakistan. Iran earlier killed two children on the former’s soil in the southwestern Baluchistan province on Tuesday.
The killer” drones and rockets hit a village in the Sistan Baluchistan province bordering Pakistan.
The Pakistanis called the operation “Marg Bar Sarmachar.”
In Iranian Farsi, “marg bar” means “death to” and in the local Baluch language, while “sarmachar” means guerrilla and is used by the militants operating in the cross-border region between the two countries.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said, “A number of terrorists were killed during the intelligence-based operation.”
It described the airstrikes as a “series of highly coordinated and specifically targeted precision military strikes against terrorist hideouts”.
The ministry added, “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.”
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.
A foreign ministry spokesman said Pakistan’s caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar will cut short a visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos following the strikes.
Iran and nuclear-armed Pakistan have long regarded each other with suspicion over border attacks, each side blaming the other for turning a blind eye to the militants.
An advocacy group for the Baluch people, HalVash, while sharing images online that appeared to show the remains of the munitions used in the attack, said a number of homes had been struck in Saravan, a city in the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchistan.
The attacks have 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.
The Pakistani strikes are the latest in several attacks on foreign soil in the last week or so.
