Pakistani troops have killed more than 1,000 al-Qaeda and Taliban rebels, including five top commanders, in a month-long offensive near the Afghan border, the military said yesterday.
Twenty-seven soldiers also died in the operation in Bajaur, one of Pakistan’s seven lawless tribal regions along the porous frontier, said Tariq Khan, inspector general of the paramilitary Frontier Corps.
“The overall toll is over 1,000 militants,” Khan told reporters who were taken by helicopter to see the scene of the fighting in remote Bajaur.
He said four of the militant commanders appeared to be foreigners: Egyptian Abu Saeed al-Masri; Abu Suleiman, an Arab; an Uzbek commander named Mullah Mansoor; and an Afghan commander called Manaras.
The fifth was a Pakistani commander named only Abdullah, a son of aging hardline leader Maulvi Faqir Mohammad who is based in Bajaur and has close ties to al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Bajaur, which borders the troubled Afghan province of Kunar, has seen some of the fiercest fighting between Pakistani forces and Islamist militants since Islamabad joined the US-led “war on terror” in 2001.
It was also the scene of a missile strike that narrowly missed Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number two, in January 2006.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
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