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QUETTA: At least 18 soldiers were killed and five, including two civilians, were injured after separatist militants launched overnight attacks in a southwestern town, an official confirmed on Saturday after a van carrying the soldiers was targeted in one of the attacks.

The attacks began late Friday when militants attacked three different spots in Mangochar town located in Balochistan’s Kalat district around 103 kilometers from the provincial capital of Quetta, Kalat Deputy Commissioner Bilal Shabbir confirmed.

The attacks took place in Pidrang, Khazeni and Mangochar Bazaar areas of the town, the deputy commissioner shared, where militants started conducting snap checking of passenger vehicles passing through the town.

In the first incident, Shabbir said a van carrying 17 soldiers from Panjgur to the provincial capital of Quetta came under attack near the mountainous area of Khazeni, where armed men battled with paramilitary Levies and Frontier Corps’ personnel.

He said one soldier of the Frontier Corps (FC) force was separately killed in clashes with the militants.

“The bodies of the slain soldiers were shifted to Quetta,” Shabbir said. “We don’t know how many attackers were killed because they took the bodies of their fighters to the mountains in the dark.”

He said three FC personnel were also injured in the attack, adding that militants also set a private bank on fire at Mangochar Bazaar.

Banned separatist outfit Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) claimed responsibility for the attacks in a statement. The group said its fighters have captured a Pakistani security forces camp in Mangochar, which Arab News could not independently verify.

Meanwhile, Assistant Commissioner Mangochar Ali Gul Hassan said two civilians were separately injured when a Quetta-Karachi passenger bus was hit with bullets at the bazaar.

He said security forces had taken control of the area and opened the Karachi-Quetta highway and its surrounding roads for traffic.

“Security forces have completed the clearance operation in the area during the early hours of Saturday and the Quetta-Karachi highway (N-25) is opened for traffic,” Hassan told Arab News.

Arab News contacted Pakistan military’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) for confirmation but did not receive a response till the filing of this report.

Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province by landmass and rich in mineral resources, has long faced a low-level insurgency led by separatist groups like the BLA, who accuse Islamabad of exploiting the province’s natural resources, such as gold and copper, while neglecting the local population.

Pakistani governments deny these allegations, saying that it has prioritized Balochistan’s development through investments in health, education and infrastructure projects.

The BLA has emerged as a significant security threat in recent years, carrying out major attacks in Balochistan and Sindh provinces while targeting security forces, ethnic Punjabis and Chinese nationals working on development projects.

The BLA launched coordinated attacks in Balochistan in August last year, killing over 50. Last month, dozens of fighters of the separatist outfit gained control of a small town in Khuzdar for hours and snatched weapons and vehicles from the local Levies force and set the Levies station on fire.

Violence by Baloch separatist factions, primarily the BLA, killed about 300 people last year, according to official statistics, marking an escalation in the decades-long conflict.

• This article originally appeared on Arab News Pakistan

LOS ANGELES, United States: Two devastating wildfires in Los Angeles were declared fully contained by firefighters on Friday after burning for more than three weeks, killing about 30 people and displacing thousands more.
The Palisades and Eaton fires in Southern California’s Los Angeles County were the most destructive in the history of the second-largest US city, burning more than 150 square kilometers and over 10,000 homes, causing damage estimated to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, updated the figures on its website on Friday to show 100 percent containment of both fires, meaning their perimeters were completely under control.
Evacuation orders were lifted earlier, with the fires not posing a serious threat for days.
Both blazes started on January 7 and their exact cause remains under investigation.
But human-driven climate change set the stage for the infernos by reducing rainfall, parching vegetation, and extending the dangerous overlap between flammable drought conditions and powerful Santa Ana winds, according to an analysis published this week.
The study, conducted by dozens of researchers, concluded that the conditions fueling the blazes were approximately 35 percent more likely due to global warming caused by burning fossil fuels.
The two fires destroyed thousands of structures over more than three weeks in the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles and Malibu, and in the Altadena community in Los Angeles County, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate their homes.
“Our recovery effort is based around getting people back home to rebuild as quickly and safely as possible,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement Friday. “We are making sure that the Palisades will be safe as residents access their properties.”
City police chief Jim McDonnell said the presence of law enforcement officers in the area would be “more than 10 times” what it was before the start of the fires.
Private meteorological firm AccuWeather has estimated the damage and economic loss at between $250 billion and $275 billion.