A massive battle with Islamist militants in an obscure Pakistani tribal region is proving to be pivotal to the country’s fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, officials said.
The six-week army operation in the remote region of Bajaur on the Afghan border is suspected to have sparked furious extremists into bombing the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad just over a week ago, they said.
While Waziristan has captured most of the headlines about Pakistan’s tribal belt in recent years, the military says Bajaur is where it faces the stiffest resistance since joining the US-led “war on terror” in 2001.
Troops backed by helicopter gunships and fighter jets have struggled to push forward in the face of bunkers, tunnel networks and organized defenses constructed by extremists.
Several blown-up Pakistani tanks littered the roads during a recent trip for journalists arranged by the military. US-built Cobra gunships could be seen pounding insurgent positions.
“This is at the center,” said Major General Tariq Khan, head of the paramilitary Frontier Corps force, which is leading the fighting.
The operation should be completed in another month and a half, Khan told reporters, but said: “If we do not take any action it will become an independent agency spreading out terror in all directions.”
The country’s new civilian government launched the Bajaur offensive last month, largely in response to US pressure to stop militants attacking foreign troops in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani military says that since then, 1,000 extremists have been killed, including al-Qaeda’s operational commander in Bajaur, Egyptian Abu Saeed Al-Masri. At least 27 troops have also died.
Pakistani security officials said it was the first time they had gone “full steam” since then-president Pervez Musharraf pushed troops into South Waziristan, the most southerly of the seven semi-autonomous tribal zones, in 2003 to tackle militants who fled the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
Operations there and in North Waziristan ended in controversial peace deals with militants that angered Washington and allowed the rebels to regroup, increasingly in Bajaur.
There, followers of Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who escaped an air strike in Bajaur in 2006, joined forces with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan group of South Waziristan-based Baitullah Mehsud, officials say.
The former government blamed Mehsud for the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, wife of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, last December.
But the cost has been high in Bajaur.
“Pakistan’s army has never faced this level of resistance since it launched operations in the tribal areas [in 2003],” a senior military official said on condition of anonymity. “Every day fighter jets are used, every day Cobras are used, yet we cannot break their strongholds.”
Dozens of civilians have died in the fighting, while about one-third of Bajaur’s population of 1 million has been displaced.
In the abandoned village of Tang Khata, where troops drove out insurgents blocking the road to Bajaur’s main city of Khar, reporters saw gutted houses filled with debris and dried cornfields left unharvested.
Meanwhile analysts say the militants have also appeared to spread the violence back into “mainland Pakistan” with the suicide truck bomb attack on the Islamabad Marriott, which left at least 60 people dead.
The rebels cannot afford to lose Bajaur’s strategic location.
To the east is the restive former tourist region of Swat and trouble is flaring south, through the Mohmand tribal area and into the major city of Peshawar.
On the Afghan side is a long frontier with the Taliban hot spot of Kunar Province.
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said earlier this month that Washington was “encouraged” by the Bajaur operation, but US military incursions into Pakistan have in fact increased since it began.
Pakistani military chief General Ashfaq Kayani urged US counterpart Admiral Mike Mullen to show “patience” with his strategy of tackling Bajaur-based militants who are hitting targets in Pakistan.
After that the focus will be on Waziristan for the main anti-US extremists, officials said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS