Global Courant
Islamabad accuses Iran of violating its airspace in attacks on armed group Jaish al-Adl and summons ambassador.
Pakistan has said two children were killed and three others injured after neighboring Iran carried out airstrikes that Islamabad described as a violation of its airspace.
Pakistan said it had summoned Tehran’s top diplomat to Islamabad over the incident.
Social media accounts reported blasts in the mountainous province of Balochistan, where the two countries share a sparsely populated border nearly 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) long.
“This violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty is completely unacceptable and could have serious consequences,” Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
It said the strike late on Tuesday “resulted in the deaths of two innocent children while three girls were injured”.
Iranian state media earlier reported that Tehran had attacked two bases of the armed group Jaish al-Adl in Pakistan, with the IRNA news agency and state television saying the attacks had used missiles and drones. Press TV, the English-language arm of Iranian state television, attributed the attack to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards. There was no official comment from Tehran.
Jaish al-Adl, the “Army of Justice,” has been carrying out deadly attacks on Iranian border guards since at least 2013 and has previously claimed bombings and kidnappings of border police.
Iran’s Nournews, which has ties to the country’s top security organization, said the bases were in Balochistan province.
The Pakistani statement did not mention the location of the incident, but two Pakistani security officials told the Associated Press news agency that the Iranian attacks had damaged a mosque in Balochistan’s Panjgur district, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) inside the border. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Tehran and Islamabad regularly accuse each other of allowing armed groups to operate from each other’s territory.
“Pakistan has always said that terrorism is a common threat to all countries in the region that requires coordinated action,” the foreign ministry statement said.
“Such unilateral acts are inconsistent with good neighborly relations and could seriously undermine bilateral trust.”
On Monday, Iran fired missiles into northern Syria, targeting the ISIL (ISIS) group, and into Iraq at what it called an Israeli “spy headquarters” near the United States consulate in the city of Erbil.
Iraq on Tuesday called the attacks, which killed several civilians, a “blatant violation” of Iraqi sovereignty and recalled its ambassador from Tehran.
