Separate attacks in Pakistan’s restive southwestern Baluchistan province killed seven troops, officials said Tuesday. An eight soldier was killed in a roadside bombing in the country’s northwest.

Afghan security forces on Tuesday repelled a fierce Taliban attack on Kunduz, officials said, a strategic city in northern Afghanistan that had briefly fallen to the militants twice in the past.

A car bomb attack on an intelligence base in central Ghazni province in Afghanistan early Monday morning killed at least seven members of the security forces and wounded 40 others.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani signed a power-sharing deal with his rival Abdullah Abdullah Sunday, marking a possible end to months of post-presidential-election turmoil and years of political tug of war between the two camps.

Bottom Line Up Front Devastating terrorist attacks in Afghanistan earlier this week shocked the country, including an attack on a maternity ward in Kabul and another at a funeral procession in Nangahar.

In a major international espionage racket, Pakistani spies recruited agents in the defence establishment of India to collect sensitive and classified information regarding Indian warships, submarines, and data on the location of naval commands. Navy personnel were also accused of spying for Pakistan.

Afghan officials have dismissed US assertion that a deadly attack on a maternity hospital in the capital Kabul earlier this week was carried out by the Daesh terrorist group, blaming the Taliban for the carnage.

The current stand-off in eastern Ladakh is the second such instance since India and China disengaged in Doklam after a 73-day stand-off in 2017. The Indian Air Force (IAF) scrambled its Su-30MKI after it spotted the movement of military helicopters on the Chinese side of the border last week.

President Ashraf Ghani says Afghanistan’s security forces will go on the offensive against the Taliban and other militant groups, following a violent day in which gunmen stormed a maternity hospital in Kabul and a suicide bomber targeted a funeral in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

Memories of the Islamic State’s 2014-2015 “caliphate” peak in Iraq and Syria colour views of its present capacity, leading officials and observers either to exaggerate or understate its threat. In Iraq, the group does pose a danger. Gauging it properly is key to containing it.