...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it...
, officials said, highlighting the challenges to a huge Chinese investment project.
The first clash was in Gwadar district, where Beijing has taken over a deepwater seaport that will be the starting point of a $46 billion "economic corridor" of roads, pipelines and rail links to Kashgar in western China.
Insurgents fired rockets at the air traffic control tower of Pasni airport in Gwadar district late on Monday, causing some damage but no casualties, paramilitary Frontier Corps front man Manzoor Ahmed told AFP.
Security forces mounted a search after the attack and this culminated in a gunbattle with hard boyz in the Zarin Bogh area, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Gwadar.
"Two soldiers were martyred and an turban was killed and another captured in a clash with security forces," Ahmed said.
Provincial home secretary Akbar Hussain Durrani confirmed the clash.
Sarbaz Baloch, a front man for the Baloch Liberation Army rebel group, grabbed credit for attack on the airport in a call to journalists.
Separately, hard boyz attacked security forces in the Mashqay area of Awaran district, with troops killing four turbans, security officials told AFP.
Earlier this month the Balochistan Liberation Front claimed an attack in the province that left 20 construction workers from elsewhere in Pakistain dead, the bloodiest separatist incident since 2006.
Resource-rich Balochistan is the largest of Pakistain's four provinces, but its roughly seven million inhabitants have long complained they do not receive a fair share of its gas and mineral wealth.
Rebels began their fifth insurgency against the state in 2004, with hundreds of soldiers and Death Eaters killed in the fighting since then.
The desperately poor province is also riven by sectarian strife and Islamist violence.