Pakistan: Four aid workers killed in northwestern Pakistan

Four aid workers were shot dead by two armed men on Monday in north-western Pakistan, in an area bordering Afghanistan which has been experiencing an upsurge in extremist violence in recent months, a police source has learned.

The victims were ambushed while driving through a village in the North Waziristan district of tribal areas, local police chief Shafiullah Gandapur told AFP.

“No one has claimed responsibility for the attack so far, but it was definitely an act of terrorism,” he added, adding that a fifth passenger in the vehicle had survived the assault. The four humanitarians were working for a program created by a local institution to help women.

Pakistani tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan have long been destabilized by fighting between the army and radical Islamist groups who operated there with impunity. They had become one of the stakes of the “war against terrorism” in the wake of the anti-American attacks of September 11, 2001.

In 2014, the Pakistani army launched a vast offensive to drive out armed Islamist movements, in particular the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, from this region.

Two years later, she claimed to have come to the end of their last stronghold, after a decade of violence that claimed the lives of several thousand people.

Extremist violence has since declined markedly in Pakistan, although some groups remain capable of carrying out deadly attacks. But a series of recent attacks targeting security forces in tribal areas has raised fears that jihadist groups have started to regroup there.