:quality(85)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/JTXWPUJ3E6IRV2XO7NFMQNLMKQ.jpg "Joe Biden affirmed that Pakistan’s attacks show that the Iranian regime “is not very well liked in the region”")
US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that airstrikes by Pakistan and Iran on each other’s territory showed that Tehran was not “very well-liked” in an increasingly tense region.
“As you can see, Iran is not very well liked in the region,” Biden told reporters at the White House, adding that “we are working to” understand how the situation will play out.
The Pakistani air force carried out retaliatory strikes against Iran early Thursday, reportedly targeting insurgent hideouts. The bombing killed at least nine people and exacerbated already considerable tensions between the two neighboring countries.
The impacts in Iran’s Sistan and Balochistan province followed Tuesday’s Iranian attack on Pakistani soil, which killed two children in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan.
The bombings on Tuesday and Thursday appeared to target separate Baloch armed groups with similar separatist goals on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border. The two countries have accused each other of offering shelter to groups operating in their respective territories.
Military operations complicated relations between the two countries. There have long been suspicions between Iran and Pakistan, a nuclear power, over militant attacks in the area. Each country faces its own internal pressures, which could have influenced military interventions.
The incident also came during Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has shaken the Middle East. Iran carried out airstrikes Monday night in Iraq and Syria in response to a suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic State that killed about 90 people this month.
The Pakistani Foreign Ministry described its bombings as “a series of highly coordinated and precisely targeted military strikes.”
“This morning’s actions were taken in light of credible information about imminent large-scale terrorist activities,” the ministry said in a statement. “This action is a statement of Pakistan’s unwavering determination to protect and defend its national security against all threats.”
The Pakistani military said it had used drones of various types, rockets and missiles that can be launched from aircraft at great distances from the target, which probably implied that the Pakistani fighters had not entered Iranian airspace.
Acting Pakistani Prime Minister Anwaarul-Haq-Kakar, who was in Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, cut short his trip to return home, according to Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch. Foreign Minister Jalil Abbas Jilani was also returning from a trip to Uganda.
A deputy governor of Iran’s Sistan and Balochistan province, Ali Reza Marhamati, said three women, four children and two men had been killed in the attack near the town of Saravan, along the border with Pakistan. He added that the dead were not Iranian citizens and acknowledged another explosion near Saravan.
The Baloch Liberation Army, a separatist group that has operated in the region since 2000, said in a statement that the attacks had hit and killed its people.
“Pakistan will pay for it,” the group warned. “Now the Baloch Liberation Army will not remain silent. “We will avenge him and announce a war against the state of Pakistan.”
Pakistan called its operation “Marg Bar Sarmachar”. In Iranian Farsi, “marg bar” means “death to,” and is a common expression since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, used against the United States and Israel. In the local Baloch language, “sarmachar” means guerrilla, and is a term used by militants operating in the border region.
Baloch nationalists have maintained a low-level insurgency in the Pakistani province of Balochistan, as well as in the neighboring Iranian province of Sistan and Balochistan, for more than two decades.
However, the groups identified in recent days are different. Jaish al-Adl, the Sunni separatist group attacked by Iran on Tuesday, was born from another Islamic extremist group known as Jundallah that was accused of having ties to Al Qaeda. Jaish al-Adhl has long been suspected of operating from Pakistan and carrying out attacks against Iranian security forces.
For its part, the Baloch Liberation Army, which has no religious component and fights against Pakistani security forces and Chinese interests in the area, is suspected of hiding in Iran.
(With information from AFP and AP)