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| An Indian soldier involved in a previous anti-terrorist operation |
By Catherine Putz
Only a week after Narendra Modi dropped in to visit Nawaz Sharif, the rapprochement is in jeopardy.
On Sunday evening, gunmen attempted to enter the Indian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan’s Balkh province. After meeting resistance from the consulate’s guards, the gunmen holed up in a nearby building where they continued to fire on the consulate. After 25 hours, TOLOnews reports that special forces “were dropped by helicopter on to the roof of the building in a bid to eliminate the insurgents.” Shortly thereafter the siege of the Indian consulate was over.
Casualty details vary. TOLOnews cites “officials” as saying that a security officer was killed and nine people, including three civilians, were injured. RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan was told at one point by Muneer Ahmed Farhad, the government spokesman in Balkh Province, that two from the Afghan security forces had been killed. Before the siege ended, Al Jazeera reported the Indian consul-general as saying that none of the consular staff had been injured in the attack.
The day before the attack on the Indian consulate, nearly 600 miles to the southeast, militants attacked an Indian air base near the Pakistani border, just south of the contested Jammu and Kashmir region. That attack began early in the morning on January 2, when at least five gunmen entered the Pathankot airbase wearing Indian Army uniforms. On Monday morning, Dushyant Singh, an inspector general in India’s National Security Guard, told a news conference that Indian forces have killed five of the attackers and that “combing and search operations continue.” As of Saturday, officials said at the Monday news conference, the attackers had been confined to a barracks building. The airbase, according to Arun Jaitley, India’s finance minister, is fairly large. He said it would take time to search for any remaining gunmen but that the “strategic assets” presumed to be the target of the attackers were unharmed and had been secured. Seven Indian soldiers have been killed in the three days following the initial attack.
Read the full story at The Diplomat