ISLAMABAD, 4 February 2007 — A suspected militant hit his explosive-laden car with a Pakistan Army convoy in a troubled part of the country’s northwest yesterday, killing two soldiers and wounding seven others, police said.
Mohammed Khan, a police official in the area, said that security forces had cordoned off the area, and that the dead and injured soldiers had been transported to a nearby military hospital.
Seven other troopers were wounded in the attack in the Barakhel area of Dera Ismail Khan, a settled district adjoining the restive tribal region of South Waziristan on the border with Afghanistan.
“The car has been totally destroyed. I can see some three to four military vehicles at the spot. The army has cordoned off the area and is not allowing anyone near,” a journalist said.
“An army convoy was on its way near Tank, when a suicide bomber rammed his car into the convoy, destroying one car and killing two soldiers,” said army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan.
North and South Waziristan are regarded as hotbeds of support for Al-Qaeda and Taleban, and peace deals struck with the government in both regions are hanging by a thread following an army air strike on a militant base last month.
Pakistani security forces have lost around 700 men since the army opened a campaign in Waziristan in late 2003 to wipe out Al-Qaeda nests, but the fighting drew the army into conflict with militant tribesmen sympathetic with the Taleban.
Despite the casualties suffered, President Pervez Musharraf has repeatedly had to deny allegations leveled by Afghan and US officials that the Taleban receives support from some elements of the Pakistan military.
At a news conference in Islamabad on Friday, Musharraf described the accusations as “preposterous,” and said Pakistan was being made a scapegoat for policy and strategy failures elsewhere.
Several government officials in the two semi-autonomous tribal agencies have been killed recently, and a series of suicide attacks in the last week have spread fear that the conflict in Waziristan is being carried into Pakistan’s cities.
Around 20 people were killed in three separate suicide attacks in the capital Islamabad, Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan town since Jan 26.
In Bannu district, next door to Dera Ismail Khan, another suspected pro-Taleban militant blew himself up yesterday while planting a bomb outside a video and music shop. The blast damaged a dozen nearby shops in Lakki Marwat, a town in Bannu district, a settled area at the gateway to North Waziristan.
“He was trying to plant the bomb outside a video shop when it went off and blew him to pieces,” a senior police official, Ashraf Zaman, said. Zaman said no one claimed the responsibility, but pro-Taleban militants, following austere interpretations of Islam, have often targeted music shops in the conservative tribal regions and nearby settled areas.
Pakistan is a key ally of the United States in its war on terror, and it has deployed about 80,000 troops in the country’s semiautonomous tribal regions, including South Waziristan, in an effort to flush out foreign militants and their local supporters.
