Militants regrouping in Balochistan, KP tribal areas, NA told.

Byline: Syed Irfan Raza

ISLAMABAD -- As the National Assembly on Friday condemned the killing of four women vocational trainers in North Waziristan on February 22, the opposition parties asked the government to take immediate notice of the regrouping of militants in the tribal districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan.

Speaking on points of order, opposition members warned the government that if timely action was not taken, the operations conducted by the armed forces in recent years to purge all those areas of terrorism might become futile.

While expressing their concern over the deteriorating law and order situation in the KP tribal districts, the opposition benches also asked Prime Minister Imran Khan to take the officials concerned to task over the renewed wave of terrorism incidents.

The house also discussed the issue of forced disappearances in Balochistan and other parts of the country.

In his speech on the floor of the house, Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Hussain Chaudhry asked the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) leadership to comment on the reported marriage of the party's 64-year-old lawmaker with a teenage girl. Parliamentary Secretary for Law and Justice Maleeka Bokhari endorsed his comments.

The issue of the killing of women trainers in North Waziristan was raised by JUI-F MNA from Bannu, Zahid Durrani, who regretted that neither the media nor the parliament had given attention to the gruesome incident. 'The people of my constituency are asking: are we not Pakistanis? Had such an incident taken place in Punjab or Sindh or any other district, media would have given it coverage and the National Assembly would have held a debate on it,' he said.

The JUI-F lawmaker demanded compensation for the slain women under the Shuhada Package and asked: 'For how long, will we continue picking up bodies?'

MNA from North Waziristan Mohsin Dawar said militants from Balochistan to North Waziristan were regrouping, which should ring an alarm for the security forces, who had conducted operations against militants in these areas.

'Terrorists are once again organising themselves in the tribal districts,' he said, adding that only a day before the killing of the women in a village near Mirali, 10 people, including government officials and a lawyer, had been kidnapped from the same locality.

He called for a thorough debate in parliament before the terrorists started striking all over the country once again.

Murtaza Javed Abbasi...