ISLAMABAD, 23 May 2007 — Four foreign rebels were killed yesterday when Pakistani troops backed by helicopter gunships stormed a suspected Al-Qaeda training camp in a tribal area bordering Afghanistan, officials said.
Soldiers raided the compound at Zargarkhel village in North Waziristan after the militants refused to meet a peace delegation flown in by helicopter and opened fire, military spokesman Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad said.
The strike came as the United States continued to press key ally President Pervez Musharraf to crush Al-Qaeda and Taleban insurgents, who have allegedly regrouped in the rugged frontier area since 2001.
“Four miscreants were killed when security forces launched an operation to bust a terrorist training camp at Zargarkhel. Helicopters were also there,” Arshad told reporters. “We involved the local tribal elders to negotiate their surrender but the delegation was fired at when it was flown to the area. The security forces retaliated and there was a gunbattle,” he said.
Residents said they saw US-built Cobra gunships flying repeated sorties toward the village, which consists of around a dozen mud-brick houses surrounded by barren hills. The operation ended after several hours, and soldiers recovered training equipment and munitions including rockets, detonators, land mines and small arms, Arshad said.
There was no “high value target” among the dead but an investigation was under way to determine their nationalities, he added.
Security officials said they were all foreigners, believed to be militants from the Central Asian state of Uzbekistan.
“This is a Uzbek training center which has been busted,” one official told AFP on condition of anonymity. “The bodies of the four foreigners have been brought to the army hospital in Miranshah (the region’s main town).”
Musharraf said in a television interview at the weekend that Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network was present in Pakistan’s tribal areas in the form of “foreigners” including Uzbeks and Arabs.
In April the president said that Pakistani tribesmen backed by the army had killed 300 mainly Uzbek militants in fierce battles in the district of South Waziristan.
Pakistani authorities signed controversial peace deals with pro-Taleban tribes in South Waziristan in 2005 and North Waziristan in 2006, following deadly clashes. The pacts alarmed NATO and US forces in Afghanistan, who said that rebels based in the region were launching cross-border attacks on their troops and on Afghan forces and civilians.
US officials including Vice President Dick Cheney, who visited Islamabad in February, have recently warned that the Al-Qaeda network has been regrouping in the Pakistani tribal belt.
Bin Laden and hundreds of his foreign fighters are believed to have fled toward northwest Pakistan after US-led forces ousted the Taleban regime in Afghanistan late in 2001 following the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
