ISLAMABAD, 30 March 2004 — Pakistani troops vowed yesterday to hunt down a group of heavily armed Al-Qaeda guerrillas, including a notorious Uzbek, who fled into mountains along the Afghan border after escaping a siege of their hide-out.
Soldiers killed more than 60 of the militants and captured 162, about 100 of them foreigners, in a 12-day offensive that officially ended on Sunday.
It was Pakistan’s biggest raid on its semiautonomous South Waziristan tribal territory.
The military claimed victory after securing the release of 12 paramilitary troops taken hostage soon after fighting began, but an unknown number of fighters escaped, possibly through a labyrinth of tunnels.
About 50 soldiers and a dozen civilians, most of them women and children, are also believed dead.
“They are on the run now and we will track them down wherever they are and we are not going to allow them to regroup,” said Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, a military spokesman.
About 50,000 army troops have been deployed in Pakistan’s rugged Afghan frontier to clear foreign militants.
“There are no other tribal communities that we know of sheltering and harboring militants. But if there are, we will find out,” said Sultan.
US forces are hunting on the other side of the mountainous border in a pincer operation. Militants linked to Al-Qaeda are widely believed to be behind bomb blasts in Madrid earlier this month that killed 190.
Sultan said a wounded senior Uzbek Al-Qaeda leader, Tahir Yuldashev, was on the run but could not confirm reports he was hiding in a wooded region of mountainous South Waziristan, where thick forests provide plenty of cover and make pursuit difficult.
Capturing Yuldashev would be a prize for President Pervez Musharraf, accused by conservative Islamic politicians of pandering to US President George W. Bush at the expense of Pakistani Muslims in the South Waziristan offensive.
Musharraf says Al-Qaeda militants with links to the tribal area were behind two attempts on his life in December.
Washington, whose intelligence operatives have been assisting Pakistan’s military, could also seize on Yuldashev’s capture as a success story in the US-led war on terror, which Pakistan joined in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Yuldashev, leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, was accused of a series of bomb blasts in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, in 1999. Sentenced to death in absentia, the fiery speaker found refuge among Afghanistan’s former Taleban rulers.
He is rumored to have led resistance to US forces during the fierce fighting in Afghanistan in the spring of 2002 before finding refuge in South Waziristan, where his gang appeared to have won over many conservative tribal people.
As convoys of troops withdrew from the area around the militant hide-out to a nearby base camp near South Waziristan’s capital of Wana, families returned on wagons and tractor-trolleys to the site of the fighting, many finding their homes destroyed.
“My family has nothing to do with any group or militants, but my house is totally destroyed. We are poor people. They have ruined us,” said one, from Serwakai, near Wana. Some schools were hit and a number of water wells destroyed, they added.
Military bulldozers had flattened nearly all the mud-walled fortress-like homes where Pashtun tribesmen had given refuge to Al-Qaeda and foreign fighters believed to include Uzbeks, Arabs and Chechens, the residents said.
The fighting began when paramilitary forces hunting Al-Qaeda and other militants ran into a hail of bullets on March 16, suggesting tribesmen were helping to protect a “high-value target”, perhaps Osama Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
Pakistan, while supporting the US war on terror, had come under pressure for not doing enough to flush out militants who have been blamed for a campaign of violence in Afghanistan.
