Army chief in Riyadh ahead of PM visit
Both trips are seen as significant as these developments suggest a thaw in ties between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia
Gen Qamar is being received by Pakistan’s recently-appointed Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Lt-Gen (retd) Bilal Akbar and Saudi military officials. PHOTO COURTESY: ARAB NEWS
ISLAMABAD:
Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa arrived in Riyadh on Tuesday ahead of the crucial trip by Prime Minister Imran Khan to Saudi Arabia later this week.
The army chief was received by Pakistan’s recently-appointed Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Lt-Gen (retd) Bilal Akbar and Saudi military officials. He will meet Saudi civil and military leadership in what seems to be part of the preparation of the prime minister s scheduled to take place on May 7.
Story highlights The DHA has also illegally occupied 50 kanals [1 kanal = roughly 506 square metres] of the Lahore high court and I will have an FIR lodged against the DHA, the Chief Justice revealed
A new war seems to be brewing in Pakistan in which on one hand is the Pakistan judiciary and on the other is the country’s army.
The dispute in this war is land grab. From grabbing the land of its neighbours, the mighty Pakistan army is now grabbing land on its own soil.
Earlier this month, three petitions were filed in Pakistan accusing the Defence Housing Authority (DHA) of illegally occupying around 40 to 50 acres of land.
The conversation we never had
Before floodgates of extremism reopen in the region, the state has to build this dam
The writer is an Islamabad-based TV journalist and tweets @FarrukhKPitafi
As a powerful blast rocked Quetta s beautifully built Serena hotel, and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility, one was reminded of our commitment to fight extremism and terrorism by all means necessary. It seems only yesterday that the vandals from the same terrorist organisation had butchered our children in APS Peshawar and the country had for once come out of its denial and vowed to defeat the menace of terrorism. A 20-point National Action Plan (NAP) that emerged out of top-level deliberations as a consensus document had committed to combating both the hardware and the software of terrorism including the underlying extremist tendencies. Two men, the then army chief and the PPP s co-chairman, Asif Ali Zardari, reportedly played an important role in the consensus-building ex
Man of the Year: Gen. Raheel Sharif
Gen. Raheel Sharif is changing Pakistan forever.
From under-trial Pervez Musharraf’s hospitalization at the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology on Jan. 2 to the attempt on news anchor Hamid Mir’s life on April 19 to the launch of Operation Zarb-e-Azb in mid-June to the attack on Peshawar’s Army Public School on Dec. 16, the year past has been a period of extraordinary adjustments within Pakistan’s much disturbed civil-military equation.
The year began badly enough with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif putting off his handpicked new Army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, by pursuing the high-treason trial against former Army chief and president Musharraf. The prime minister also showed “excessive enthusiasm” for closer relations with India, attending the investiture of Narendra Modi as India’s prime minister even as the Indian Army was killing civilians with mortar fire across the Line of Control in Kashmir.