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ISLAMABAD: Pakistan witnessed an increase in terrorist attacks in 2023 with 306 incidents reported across the country, marking a 17 percent surge in militant attacks compared to 262 terror attacks in 2022.

A total of 306 terrorist attacks took place in Pakistan in the year 2023 including 23 suicide bombings – which killed 693 people (330 security personnel, 260 civilians, and 103 militants) and injured 1,124 others, said the annual security report of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS).

It says that these attacks marked an increase of 17 percent from the year before, and the number of people killed in these attacks also represented an increase of 65 percent from those killed in similar attacks during the previous year.

The report says that compared to 2022, the frequency of terrorist incidents in the Balochistan province increased by 39 percent, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by three percent, in Sindh by 87 percent, and in Punjab by 100 percent.

It says that religiously inspired militant groups perpetrated a combined total of 208 terrorist attacks, which killed 579 people and injured 938 others. Different Baloch and Sindhi nationalist insurgent groups carried out 86 attacks that claimed 90 lives and wounded another 151 people, it says, adding that 12 sectarian-related terrorist attacks were recorded in 2023 that claimed 24 lives.

The report says that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa faced the highest number of attacks for any one region of the country. Balochistan was the second most terrorism-affected province in 2023, after Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa where a total of 110 recorded attacks claimed 229 lives and wounded 282 others.

As many as 15 terrorist attacks took place in Sindh province including 14 attacks in Karachi alone and one attack in Jamshoro in interior Sindh. Six terrorist attacks took place in Punjab in 2023, which claimed 16 lives and injured eight others, it says.

It says that the key actors of terrorist violence were also more pronounced in the year 2023; over 82 percent of the terrorism-related deaths resulted from attacks perpetrated by three major groups including the TTP [and its subsidiaries such as Tehrik-e-Jihad Pakistan], Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K), and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA).

These three groups carried out over 78 percent of the total terrorist attacks recorded in the country in the year under review.

It says that security and law enforcement agencies stepped up anti-militant kinetic actions in 2023, especially in the second half of the year.

They conducted 129 anti-militant operational strikes in 2023, compared to 87 in the year before, which caused a total of 425 fatalities or deaths (373 militants, 43 army soldiers, five policemen, two Levies, and two civilians), as compared to 327 in 2022, besides injuring 51 others.

Out of the total 129 operational strikes recorded in 2023, as many as 97 happened in KP, 28 in Balochistan, three in Punjab, and one in Sindh’s provincial capital, i.e., Karachi.

Furthermore, security and law enforcement agencies also entered into a total of 24 armed clashes and encounters with militants – compared to 11 such incidents in the previous year.

These armed clashes and encounters claimed 55 lives (37 militants, 16 soldiers, and two policemen) and injured three others including two militants and one policeman, it says.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024

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