DERA ISMAIL KHAN, 17 January 2008 — Militants overran a remote military outpost close to the Afghan border, sparking a fight that killed seven Pakistani soldiers and 50 of the attackers, the military said yesterday.
Twenty of the paramilitary troops from the garrison were still missing after the late Tuesday night incident, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said.
“About 200 militants charged the fort from four sides,” he said. “They broke through the fort’s wall with rockets.” Fifteen men from the garrison reached Jandola safely, an army base located about 35 kilometers east of the occupied Saroghai Fort, Abbas said.
The militants attacked the fort in the South Waziristan region at about midnight on Tuesday and fighting went on for at least two hours, Abbas said.
The fall of the fort represents the first time rebels have captured a government position since last October, when they seized several police stations and military posts in Swat valley, another volatile region in the country’s north. The government has since recaptured the valley. Abbas said the fort was manned by the paramilitary Frontier Corps at the time of the attack. He said government artillery had shelled the region.
Fifty attackers died in the assault, Abbas said. It was not immediately possible to verify the army’s claim, but in the past the rebels have given much lower figures for their own casualties.
Saroghai Fort — which dates back to the British colonial period — is one of several dozen such posts located along South Waziristan’s mountainous border with Afghanistan.
Government forces based there monitor and patrol the frontier, a principal staging area for volunteers and the transportation of weapons crossing into Afghanistan.
The area where the fort is located is a stronghold of Al-Qaeda-linked militant leader Baitullah Mehsud, who the government said was behind the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi on Dec. 27.
Separately, a bomb exploded as a military patrol was passing along a road in the Swat valley in North West Frontier Province yesterday but there was no immediate word on casualties, police said.
Security forces have been trying to clear hundreds of militants from the Swat valley since November.
Pakistan has been hit by about 20 suicide attacks in the past three months in which about 400 people perished. They included Benazir.
In a separate incident in South Waziristan, government forces were said to have shelled suspected militant positions around the town of Makin.
“The bazaar is closed and most of the people have fled,” said Mohammed Alam, who runs a call office in Makin.
