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20-01-2024
TEHRAN: Iran said on Friday that it successfully carried out an air defence drill using drones designed to intercept hostile targets in an area stretching from its southwestern to southeastern coasts, amid heightened tensions in the region.
On Thursday, Pakistan launched strikes on terrorists’ hideouts inside Iran in a retaliatory attack two days after Tehran violated the country’s sovereignty by launching a strike in Balochistan that left two children dead and injured three girls.
In a statement, the Pakistan Army said the hideouts used by terrorist militant organizations, namely Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF), were successfully struck in an intelligence-based operation, the code-named “Marg Bar Sarmachar”.
The tit-for-tat strikes were the highest-profile cross-border intrusions in recent years and have raised alarm over wider instability in the Middle East since the war between Israel and Hamas erupted on Oct 7.
“Iranian forces have successfully launched a new air defence method that uses drones to intercept and target hostile targets,” state-run Press TV quoted an Iranian army spokesman as saying.
The two-day drills, which began on Thursday, cover an area from Abadan in southwestern Khuzestan province to Chahbahar in southeastern Sistan and Baluchistan province that borders Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Press TV said the army’s air force and navy, the aerospace force, and the navy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) participated in the exercises.
Iran and Pakistan have a history of rocky relations but both have signaled a desire to cool tensions in the wake of this week’s strikes.
Against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, Iran and its militia allies around the Middle East have been carrying out attacks on Israeli and US targets in the region in support of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Iran has also launched strikes on Syria against what it said were Islamic State sites, and Iraq, where it said it had struck an Israeli espionage centre.
Pakistan’s foreign minister urged closer cooperation on security issues in a call with his Iranian counterpart on Friday and expressed his country’s readiness to work with Iran on all issues, media reported citin Pakistan’s foreign ministry.
The leaders from the two neighboring nations spoke a day after Pakistan fired retaliatory strikes on what it said were militant targets in Iran in response to Tehran’s strikes this week targeting what it called militant bases in Pakistan.
Pakistan said on Friday it did not want to escalate a standoff with Iran, as Islamabad’s top civilian and military leadership gathered to review the situation after both countries exchanged strikes on militant bases on each other’s territory.
Caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar ul Haq Kakar has begun a meeting of the high-powered National Security Committee, with all the military services chiefs in attendance, a source in the prime minister’s Office told media. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
