ALI SUKHANVER
At least 15 people were killed and so many wounded when a powerful bomb went off near an army truck in Quetta12th August 2017. The death toll is feared to go up as some of the injured ones are in critical condition. It was another day of brutality and cruelty for the people of Pakistan in August which is the Month of Independence of Pakistan. According to the ISPR, the blast took place near Mehdi Hospital at Pishin Stop and an army truck was the main target of the terrorists. Certainly as per tradition, this terrorist activity was also a part of the plan of keeping the people away from Pakistan Day celebrations. The terrorists are misguided by the notion that they can frighten the people of Balochistan with bomb blasts and other terrorist activities. And this is not a new practice of their; every year in the month August, a handful of terrorists start planning to give a new pungent colour to Pakistan Independence Day celebrations in Balochistan; fortunately such plans never succeed though the country has to face a grave loss of some very precious lives.
Let us look back to 8th August, 2016; that was the day when a suicide bomber struck as more than 100 mourners, mostly lawyers and journalists, crowded into the emergency department of Quetta’s Civil Hospital. They all were there to accompany the body of the president of Balochistan Bar Association Advocate Bilal Anwar Kasi who was shot dead by an unknown gunman. Various militant groups claimed the responsibility for this massacre. Just three days after this incident, a roadside bomb hit a Pakistani security vehicle and wounded 13 people again in Quetta. Earlier in 2013 on the same date 8th August, a suicide attacker exploded a bomb at a funeral being held for a police officer in Quetta, and killed as many as thirty-one people and injured over fifty people. According to the details a senior police officer Fayaz Sumbal was doing the body-search of all those who were coming there to participate in the funeral when a suicide-bomber wearing a jacket blew him up. The jacket had a huge amount of ball bearings and shrapnel inside. No group claimed the responsibility for the bombing.
The actual game behind all these terrorist activities could be easily understood by a very brief comment of the Reuters in a report which said, ‘A Chinese-funded trade corridor with promised investment of $46 billion is due to pass through the gas-rich province and the government has promised to boost security.’ The terrorists are simply trying to stop China from funding this project and on the other hand are trying to give an impression to the common people of Balochistan that the government of Pakistan has no guts to provide security to the people and foreign funded development projects. But strange thing is that why do the terrorists become more active in the month of August.
It is a very common misunderstanding about the terrorist activities in Balochistan that the terrorists are backed and supported by extremist religious groups. This false notion is actually a product of the Indian brains who wish to divert the attention of the people from the real culprits and instigate them against the religious people. The facts are altogether otherwise. Whatever is happening there in Balochistan has nothing to do with religious elements. Creating disturbance in Balochistan has ever been the joint aim and objective of India, US and Israel. For this purpose they support and patronize a very few self-claimed so-called Baloch separatist leaders who have taken refuge in Switzerland, Sweden, US and London. These so-called and self-claimed separatist leaders remain busy in defaming Pakistan’s security agencies in relation to extrajudicial killings, mutilated bodies and the missing persons with full support of various NGOs and human rights organizations. August is their most favourite time for the anti-Pakistan activities as August is the month of Pakistan Independence. The terrorists believe that their activities would frighten the people of Balochistan and they would not take part in any type of Pakistan Day celebrations. Pakistan is a passion and passions could not be crushed with weapons but unfortunately these foreign funded terrorists are blind to this reality.