Six soldiers and four members of an armed Islamist group were killed in a shootout in north-west Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan on Tuesday, the Pakistani army said.
The Pakistani Taliban Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), accustomed to overestimating the number of casualties in their attacks, claimed responsibility for an attack in the same area and said they killed 18 soldiers.
The Army Communications Service (ISPR) said in a statement that “four terrorists” and “six brave soldiers” were killed in a shootout in South Waziristan district.
The TTP fighters managed to “ambush two army vehicles (…), killing 18 soldiers,” the armed group said in a statement.
Pakistan has faced deteriorating security, particularly in Afghanistan’s border regions, for several months, particularly since the Taliban took power in Kabul in August 2021.
Islamabad believes some of these attacks are planned from Afghan soil, which Kabul denies.
After renouncing an uneasy ceasefire in November and promising to carry out attacks across Pakistan, the TTP stepped up its attacks, mainly targeting the security forces, particularly the police.
In January, a man whom the authorities said was linked to the TTP detonated the bomb he was carrying in a mosque at a police base in Peshawar (northeast), killing more than 80 police officers.
The TTP, which differs from the Afghan Taliban but shares their fundamentalist Islamist ideology, emerged in Pakistan in 2007.
In less than a decade, tens of thousands of Pakistani civilians and members of the security forces were killed before being pushed out of tribal areas by a military operation launched in 2014, improving security for several years.
South Waziristan is one of these former semi-autonomous tribal areas where the Pakistani army conducted numerous operations against insurgents linked to the Al Qaeda network and the Taliban following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and its NATO allies.
The tribal areas under federal administration (Fata) returned to federal administration in 2018 with the merger with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region.