WANA, Pakistan, 22 March 2004 — Pakistani forces agreed yesterday to allow a 25-member tribal council free passage into a battle zone in an effort to negotiate a peace deal with local elders sheltering hundreds of Al-Qaeda fighters, but insisted they would never back off a demand that the militants be handed over.
The administration chief of South Waziristan said a cease-fire was possible only if the tribesmen freed their hostages and surrendered hundreds of Al-Qaeda fighters and their supporters.
The tribal peace council is to travel to the region this morning under the protection of a white flag, said Brig. Mahmood Shah, chief of security for the area. Fighting would stop while the council was negotiating, though Shah refused to call it a cease-fire.
The council will be carrying a list of three government demands: that the elders free 12 soldiers and two government officials taken captive earlier this week; that they hand over tribesmen involved in the fighting; and that they kick out any foreigners or show the military where to track them down.
“These tribesmen must hand over all the wanted people, or the operation will proceed,” Shah told journalists in Peshawar.
The army yesterday sent six bodies of suspected Chechen terrorists from Wana to a hospital in Rawalpindi for DNA tests. “We will do DNA test on the bodies of these Chechens to confirm their identity,” said a military officer. Pakistani troops yesterday killed two Chechen militants. “They were killed while trying to flee the area,” Shah said. The militants were killed on the fourth day of a continuing operation to capture foreign and local fighters loyal to Al-Qaeda in the South Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border.
Shah appeared to distance himself from earlier speculation about the presence of a “high value” Al-Qaeda target in the area such as Osama Bin Laden’s No. 2 Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
“We worked on two theories that maybe there is some important man in the area and that is why the resistance was so heavy,” he told AFP. Shah said that following searches in the area “there is no indication of any high value target from material recovered”.
He said the fighters’ resistance appeared to have “weakened” since Saturday.
