PAKISTAN: Military says strategically important village captured after intensive fighting

Record ID: 607788

  • Title: PAKISTAN: Military says strategically important village captured after intensive fighting
  • Date: 26th October 2008
  • Summary: TRIBAL ELDERS SITTING (SOUNDBITE) (Pashto) MALIK QADAR KHAN, TRIBAL ELDER SAYING: "The Pakistan army and Pakistan's tribesmen are quite capable of defending their own soil. We will not accept any interference from outside. That should be stopped. We take responsibilty for our land." HELICOPTER FLYING PIGEONS ROOSTING OVER DESTROYED HOUSE MORE OF HELICOPTER FLYING SOLDIERS
  • Embargoed: 10th November 2008 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Pakistan
  • Country: Pakistan
  • Topics: Defence / Military
  • Reuters ID: LVA48Z8HYUR6S5LDN69A523NJ161
  • Story Text: Pakistani forces have 'turned the corner' in the country's main front in its war against militancy with the capture of a strategically important village after heavy fighting, a commander said on Saturday (October 25).
    The commander of the offensive in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border said his men were estimated to have killed more than 1,500 militants since August while 73 soldiers had been killed.
    There has been no independent verification of the military's casualty estimate but soldiers on the front said the fighting had been fierce with well-organised and well-supplied militants battling hard from networks of tunnels and fortified compounds.
    The army has pushed militants off a road running west from the region's main town of Khar, with villages along the road suffering heavy damage.
    Villagers fled before the fighting.
    But the militants still lurk a few kilometres either side of the road and were exchanging intermittent fire with security forces on Saturday when the military took a group of reporters to the destroyed village of Loisam captured in the past few days.

    "We have now captured Loisam which was supposed to be considered the end-all as far as the militants were concerned," said Major-General Tariq Khan commander of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, who is in charge of the offensive.
    He said he believed they had "turned the corner" and the worst was over.
    Khan described Bajaur as the militants' centre of gravity, a mountainous region giving the insurgents easy access to other Pakistani tribal agencies and to Afghanistan.
    The militants had made extensive preparations to defend it, he said.

    "Militants offered very stiff resistance. It was a very unusual kind of a battle, it was not conventional. The resistance would dissolve in places wherever we would attack. It would regroup and reappear in the rear.
    This was facilitated by the tunnels and the underground tunnels that were made with caches for weapons etc. that had been stored and placed all over," Khan said.
    Bajaur is one of seven semi-autonomous ethnic Pashtun regions in northwest Pakistan, known as tribal agencies, where al Qaeda and Taliban have been expanding their influence in recent years.
    The United States, facing a surge in Taliban violence in Afghanistan, has been pressing Pakistan to eliminate militant havens in the agencies.
    U.S. forces have carried out about a dozen missile strikes and a commando raid in North and South Wazirisan, to the southeast of Bajaur, in recent weeks.
    Khan said 300 foreigners had been captured in the fighting including Uzbeks, Tajiks and Afghans.
    Loisam is on a cross-roads and controls access to three of four valleys in the area. Its capture would disrupt militant communications and infiltration routes, he said.
    The village itself has been almost completely destroyed. Concrete shops in its centre have been reduced to broken slabs of rubble.
    Soldiers now occupying the mud-walled compounds they captured in the fighting fired heavy machine guns towards militants who responded with rifle fire from a web of dried-up river beds that cut through the countryside.
    Tanks fired rounds from their cannons across terraced fields, their abandoned crops shrivelled on the parched ground, while helicopter gunships circled, occasionally firing down.
    The authorities are encouraging the area's Pashtun tribesmen to revive traditional militias known as lashkars, to take on the militants and secure areas captured by the army.
    One tribal elder, Malik Qadar Khan, explaining why he and his men were forming a lashkar, said the people of Bajaur who had supported the Islamist guerrillas who battled Soviet occupying forces Afghanistan in the 1980s, were quite capable of fending for themselves.
    They would not tolerate any outside interference.

    "The Pakistan army and Pakistan's tribesmen are quite capable of defending their own soil. We will not accept any interference from outside.
    That should be stopped. We can take responsibilty for our land," he said.
    The strategy of supporting tribal militias to evict militants bears a parallel with the Awakening Council movement in Iraq, in which Sunni tribesmen have risen against al Qaeda and driven them from their neighbourhoods with help from the U.S.
    military.
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