Bomb blast at Pakistani market kills 8

Terror reigns

An explosion at a market in Pakistan’s Bajaur tribal agency killed at least eight people and wounded 22 (ET, CNN, AJE, The Nation). Locals said the market belongs to Shahabuddin Khan, a former Awami National Party (ANP) Member of Parliament and current leader of Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N). The ongoing violence in Pakistan’s troubled northwest has led psychiatrists to estimate that millions of residents are living with depression and other psychological illnesses as a result of years of bombings, army offensives, and drone strikes (AP). Pakistan has nowhere near enough trained psychiatrists and psychologists, and many patients face social consequences for seeking help for mental disorders.

A group of militants attacked a Pakistani Frontier Corps checkpoint in the Orakzai tribal region on Wednesday, sparking a battle that left three soldiers and at least 10 militants dead (AFP). Elsewhere in the tribal regions, around 20 militants snuck across the border with Afghanistan to attack a checkpoint in Kurram Agency on Wednesday, wounding two Frontier Corps troops (ET).

The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Thursday issued a rare statement regarding Muslims abroad, threatening to attack Myanmar to avenge the deaths of the Rohingya Muslim minority, unless the Pakistani government cuts off all ties with the Myanmar government (AFP).

Pakistani officials said Thursday that they had temporarily halted NATO supply trucks’ movement in Pakistan as a security precaution after an attack on one convoy on Tuesday killed a truck driver in Jamrud (AFP). The Pakistani government has reportedly decided to sue the British tabloid The Sun for libel, after the paper published a front-page "exposé" claiming that Pakistani officials were offering to sneak citizens into the Olympics with fake visas for a fee (Dawn, The News, DT, AFP).

Missed target

A bomb blast targeting Afghan police in the western province of Ghor on Tuesday instead killed seven children grazing their cattle near a fresh water spring, Afghan authorities said on Wednesday (AP).

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that an American Border Patrol agent working in Afghanistan was the one to shoot the attacker who killed two American and one British contractor on Sunday (AP).

Swords to ploughshares

More than two decades after the Afghan-Soviet war came to an end, Soviet tanks still litter the landscape of the western Afghan province of Herat (Reuters). Locals are making good use of these reminders of Afghanistan’s ongoing decades of war, though; the iron tracks are removed from the tanks and smelted to produce steel bars used in Afghanistan’s construction industry.

— Jennifer Rowland