MINGORA, Pakistan: Pakistan’s military said yesterday a full-scale offensive in the northwest has militants scampering for safety after President Asif Ali Zardari vowed to exterminate the Taleban.
In an interview with PBS television, Zardari said he had ordered an unspecified number of troops moved from the country’s eastern border with India to the northwest to assist the operation against the militants. He said more troops would be moved out if needed, but pointed out that Pakistan’s command posts and cantonments were all on the “southern border” with India.
Asked if Washington pressed him to do so, Zardari said: “No. It was the demand-based proposition. When the demand goes up, we shift.”
As warplanes pounded Taleban hide-outs in Swat Valley yesterday, civilians cowered in hospital beds and trapped residents struggled to feed their children. Warplanes and troops killed at least 55 militants yesterday in what Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani called the fight for Pakistan’s survival.
“They are on the run,” the army said in a statement, but added that Taleban fighters were “trying to block the exodus of innocent civilians by preventing their departure through coercion, IEDs (improvised explosive devices), roadblocks with trees and even (making them) hostages.”
The federal Cabinet yesterday declared the militants “anti-state elements” and said the military offensive in the Malakand administrative division will continue until their complete elimination.
Gilanim, who briefed the media about the Cabinet decision, refused to give a time frame for the completion of the operation, saying: “It is not a normal war.”
He said the government had pledged to keep civilian casualties to the minimum. The offensive has prompted the flight of hundreds of thousands of terrified residents, adding a humanitarian emergency to the nuclear-armed nation’s security, economic and political problems. Desperate refugees looted UN supplies in one camp, taking blankets and cooking oil.
Witness accounts indicate that scores of civilians have been killed or injured in the escalating clashes in the Swat, Buner and Lower Dir districts. Doctors and medics have joined an increasing flow of refugees streaming out of the area. Only three doctors remained yesterday at the hospital in Swat’s main town, Mingora — all of them working flat out. One of the patients, Omar Ali, said a mortar shell had crashed through the roof of his home near Mingora on Wednesday, killing his eight-year-old son. Ali, his wife and four more children were injured. Neighbors pulled them from the rubble and brought them to hospital.
To add to the confusion, a suspected US missile strike killed nine people, mostly foreigners, in South Waziristan, another militant stronghold near the Afghan border, Pakistani intelligence officials said. The identities of the victims remained unclear.
