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Pakistan resumes strikes on militants

Pakistani forces pressed ahead yesterday with the new government’s first major offensive against Islamist militants, demolishing an insurgent group’s building near the Afghan border.

The operation was launched a day earlier in the Khyber District outside the northwestern city of Peshawar, in an apparent bid to counter Western concerns about Islamabad’s peace talks with Taliban rebels.

But insurgents struck back in another northwestern region yesterday, killing two Pakistani soldiers in a bomb blast and shooting dead four people including a pro-government tribal elder, the military and police said.

“The situation is under control. There has been no resistance,” senior local administration official Mehmood Afridi said about the operation in Khyber. Officials said on Saturday that one militant was killed.

In a village near Bara, the main town in Khyber, soldiers yesterday blew up a building belonging to a Taliban-linked group, Ansar-ul-Islam, which has been accused of sending fighters across the border into Afghanistan.

“There was no resistance as the building used by Ansar-ul-Islam as their center was empty,” a security official said.

Paramilitary forces set up checkpoints and patrolled Bara in tanks and armored personnel vehicles, while some soldiers began advancing to other areas in the district, including Ansar-ul-Islam’s stronghold in the Tirah Valley.

The famous Khyber Pass, which runs through the region, is the main supply route for NATO and US forces in Afghanistan and officials say rebel groups in the area have been robbing and attacking convoys.

Officials said the rebels had also threatened Peshawar, burning CD and video shops deemed un-Islamic, carrying out several kidnappings and trying to set up Islamic courts.

The troops on Saturday razed the house and headquarters of the region’s top militant warlord, Mangal Bagh, head of the separate Lashkar-e-Islam (LI) group, which officials said was not linked to the Taliban.

Bagh told a newspaper that he did not know why he was being targeted and said his men had never attacked security forces.

“I have told LI volunteers to go home and not to resist any action,” he was quoted as saying by the News, an English language daily.

Security officials said Bagh’s men were the prime culprits for raiding trucks headed for Western forces, but said that their activities were mainly criminal and that they were not responsible for cross-border attacks.

Pakistan has come under growing pressure to crack down on militants, with the US and other NATO countries with troops in Afghanistan expressing concerns over the government’s negotiations with the rebels.

The government launched the talks soon after defeating allies of US-backed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in elections February, saying that his strongarm tactics were worsening a wave of suicide bombings and other violence.
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