WANA, 21 June 2004 — Pakistani authorities yesterday renewed an amnesty offer to foreign militants hiding in the tribal region near the Afghan border as calm returned to the area following the killing of renegade pro-Taleban tribal leader Nek Mohammad, officials said.
Troops were manning military checkpoints yesterday in the South Waziristan region but no military operations were carried out, officials said.
There also have been no exchanges of gunfire between government soldiers and militants since the death of Nek, officials said.
“It is basically a quiet day and there was no search operation,” an official said.
Residents in the region’s main town Wana, 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the porous Afghan frontier, said a gunship helicopter flew overhead earlier in the day but no airstrikes were reported.
Nek, along with seven colleagues including three foreign suspects, was killed in an attack by Pakistani troops on his hide-out near Wana late Thursday.
Nek, who was in his late 20s, had served as a Taleban commander during the hard-line militia’s five-year rule in Afghanistan and trained Central Asian militants at a garrison just north of Kabul.
Security officials believe he sheltered hundreds of Chechen and Uzbek fighters around Wana when they fled the US-led offensive to destroy the Taleban in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States.
“Things are improving and the situation is better,” military spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan told AFP.
Pakistan’s military launched a campaign to root out foreign fighters earlier this month after Nek defied an April 24 accord under which he promised that foreigners would denounce militancy in return for being granted amnesty if they registered with the authorities.
The five-day operation in the mountainous Shakai area near Wana, which came after militants ignored repeated calls to register, left 55 militants and 18 soldiers dead.
The Shakai operation was the second since March when Nek led a bloody resistance to a counterterrorism offensive in the Azam Warsak area that left 124 people dead, including 63 militants, 46 soldiers and 15 civilians. Security officials said Nek’s killing may clear a major hurdle to the government’s efforts to rid the area of Al-Qaeda-linked radicals.
Musharraf Fears Retaliation for Raids on Tribes
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is worried about retaliation for recent security raids on tribal groups harboring Al-Qaeda-linked militants in a remote region bordering Afghanistan.
In an interview published in the online version of Britain’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper, Musharraf said he hoped the fighting would not spread to other tribal areas.
“But it can have a fallout — these people have contacts elsewhere in the country and they can retaliate in the rest of the country in the form of bomb blasts, attacks on important persons and installations — and so we have to guard against that.”
Musharraf faces bitter opposition from hard-line groups over his decision to side with Washington in its war against Al-Qaeda.
The decision also put him on a collision course with conservative Pashtun tribal leaders harboring members of the Al-Qaeda network who have fled over the border to escape the US military in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Musharraf, who survived two assassination attempts in December, also said he was worried about the rise of suicide bombers in Pakistan. In the first assassination attempt, militants planted bombs under a bridge over which his motorcade passed. In the second, two suicide bombers tried to ram their explosives-laden vehicles into his motorcade.
