Four Pakistani soldiers killed in rocket attack

Four Pakistani soldiers were killed and four others were injured in a rocket attack that was allegedly carried out by militants based in Afghanistan along the Pak-Afghan border, Pakistani military said on Sunday.

The Pakistani army is now engaged in a massive operation to drive out militants in Khyber and other tribal regions.

Rockets were fired from the Afghanistan side of the border into the Khyber region, one of the seven semi-autonomous tribal regions where the Pakistan military has been battling the Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants for years.

Afghanistan recently accused Pakistan of not doing enough to arrest Afghan Taliban leaders who have been meeting to decide on a successor to the group’s founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, whose death was confirmed last month.

However, an ongoing military offensive is said to have cleared most of the area of insurgents and officials say only a few pockets located in hard mountainous areas have yet to be eliminated.

Pakistan earlier summoned the Afghan ambassador to lodge a protest over a border clash in which three Frontier Constabulary men were killed on August 16-17.

Pakistan has been battling a homegrown Islamist insurgency for over a decade following the late 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.