WANA, 22 March 2007 — Tribesmen and Al-Qaeda militants traded mortar and rocket fire for a third day yesterday, leaving at least 106 people dead, officials said.
Pakistani troops also shelled the Uzbek militants sheltering in the mountainous tribal area of South Waziristan, security officials and residents said, although military spokesman Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad said that “government forces are not involved in the tribal feud.”
Saeedullah Khan, a journalist based in Dera Ismail Khan, meanwhile, told Arab News army convoys were seen moving toward the site of the conflict.
He said one of the Al-Qaeda men killed in the clashes was an Arab who had received training in Iraq.
Interior Minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao said the peace deal with tribesmen was yielding results.
The fighting started Monday after ex-Taleban commander Mullah Nazir, who backs President Pervez Musharraf’s moves to expel foreign fighters from the area, ordered followers of Uzbek militant Tahir Yuldashev to disarm.
Officials said Yuldashev, who leads a group called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, was formerly a close confidant of Osama Bin Laden. He has been sentenced to death in absentia for bombings in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.
“At least 78 Uzbeks and their local supporters and 28 supporters of Mullah Nazir have died, including four children killed by a shell,” a security official told AFP on condition of anonymity. More than half of the fatalities have occurred since Tuesday night, when Nazir gave the Uzbeks a deadline to leave Kalusha, the town where the violence has been centered.
Residents and a senior security official said troops launched shells at foreign militants early yesterday after the insurgents fired on their camp in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan.
Smoke was also seen billowing after army artillery destroyed two bunkers that militants had recently set up on the outskirts of the city to fight the local tribesmen, residents said.
Meanwhile, local Taleban militants allied with the tribesmen attacked and seized control of a private jail being run by Uzbek militants in Azam Warsak, near Kalusha, the officials said.
The local militants freed three local tribesmen and one Afghan who were chained up, they said. An amount of explosives stored at the jail also exploded, causing an unknown number of casualties.
A tribal council, or jirga, led by a leading pro-Taleban party had left for Wana in a bid to negotiate a truce, officials said.
The fighting ended a cease-fire negotiated about two weeks ago after 19 people died in fierce gunbattles between Yuldashev’s supporters and tribesmen in Azam Warsak.
Yuldashev and his men were among thousands of militants who fled the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 and sought shelter with ethnic Pashtun tribesmen in Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt along the border.
