WANA, Pakistan, 21 March 2004 — Pakistan’s army has arrested over 100 suspected militants after five days of intense battles near the Afghan border. However, the operation was marred by the deaths of 13 civilians in disputed circumstances.
Pakistani forces began to flush out foreign militants and local tribal allies yesterday from their heavily fortified mud-walled compounds in the country’s wild west, after raining fire on their hideouts overnight.
But the army continues to face the stiffest resistance it has encountered since launching operations last year in the lawless tribal areas in an attempt to find Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and his supporters.
An intelligence source said two Chechen militants, identified as Danyar and Quaran Ata, were believed to be in the area and there was a possibility that a prominent Uzbek militant, Tahir Yaldashev, was with them.
The offensive, involving several thousand soldiers, is the biggest Pakistan has waged since it joined the US-led war on terror after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Dozens of fighters have been killed and about 100 suspected militants, many of them foreigners, captured, the army said.
“They are extremely professional fighters. They wait for our troops to move within five to seven meters and then open fire,” said Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, the top military commander in the region.
“They are taking us from every direction whenever our troops have moved in, and we do not know if the locals are with us,” he said. “With an undefined target like this, it is practically chasing shadows.”
Reporters saw an army truck carrying 30 or 40 prisoners, blindfolded and with hands tied behind their backs.
Most were bearded and wearing the traditional Pakistani shalwar kameez long shirt and baggy trousers. Some wore Muslim prayer caps, others the brown woolen caps common in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The civilians died when their vehicles were fired upon, a senior security official said. There were differing accounts and death tolls, with two officials saying a Pakistani Army helicopter had been responsible for the attack.
But Brig. Mehmood Shah, chief of security in Pakistan’s tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan, blamed militants.
He said five men, five women and three children had been killed when their two vehicles were fired on by militants inside the army cordon. Seven people had been wounded, Shah said.
But a local security official on the border said 12 people including women and children had been killed by an army helicopter hunting militants. “After the army received casualties the gunship helicopters were directed to hit the cars,” said the official, who declined to be identified.
An army spokesman denied that civilians had been killed but said some people had been killed in an army attack early yesterday when trying to escape through the army cordon.
Gen. Hussain said the militants were defending long-established and well-defended camps with an extensive network of trenches and sentries posted on watchtowers.
