Pakistani army kills more than 20 militants near border
PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Pakistani forces clashed with heavily armed foreign militants yesterday, killing more than 20 people in a mountainous tribal region near the Afghan border where hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters are believed to be hiding, officials and a tribal elder said.
The bloodshed follows weeks of failed efforts to get the militants in South Waziristan to surrender to authorities by peaceful means, after an army counterterrorism offensive in March that left 120 people dead.
Brigadier Mahmood Shah, chief of security for Pakistan's tribal regions, said foreigners and local tribesmen had been holed up in four fortress-like houses, about 25 miles from the Afghan frontier. He said they traded fire with paramilitary and army soldiers who had surrounded the area.
He said about 20 foreign militants and one paramilitary soldier had been killed, and three civilians had died in the crossfire.
''The intermittent shooting continued until 4:30 p.m. and then finally it stopped," Shah told the private Geo television network. ''According to our information, up to 20 foreigners have been killed. We have bodies of several of them. One injured is also with us.'
An army statement said earlier that the bodies of at least eight militants, some of them foreigners, had been retrieved and that one wounded militant captured. The security forces suffered a few casualties, it said.
Pakistani officials gave no information about the nationalities and the identities of those killed and captured in the clash in the Ghat Ghar area, about 20 miles west of Wana, the main town in South Waziristan.
Pakistan's tribal areas bordering Afghanistan are a possible hideout for Osama bin Laden and his chief aide, Ayman al-Zawahiri. There was no immediate indication that top Al Qaeda figures were among those involved in the clash.
Separately, Afghan and US forces killed scores of Taliban rebels in a seven-day operation hundreds of miles to the southwest in a mountainous district of Afghanistan. Jan Mohammed Khan, commander of Afghan forces and the governor of neighboring Uruzgan province, said 73 Taliban fighters were killed and 13 captured over seven days, while six Afghan government forces and four coalition soldiers were wounded and none killed.
US military officials were not available for comment.
Daychopan, a remote area and Taliban stronghold, lies near the borders of two neighboring provinces, Uruzgan and Kandahar, some 190 miles southwest of Kabul.
Tension has been building in South Waziristan over the past month as authorities have pressured tribesmen to evict hundreds of Central Asian, Arab, and Afghan militants, many of whom moved there from Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001.
The militants have refused to register with authorities despite a government amnesty offer that would allow them to settle in Pakistan if they renounce terrorism and abide by national laws.
The army and its leader President General Pervez Musharraf, a key US ally in its war on terrorism, have warned that another military operation could be launched unless the foreign militants give themselves up.
