Strange Bedfellows: Pak Army, US Army and TTP Pakistani Taliban
This situation has been made possible by coordinated efforts by both the Pak Army and NATO forces, whereas the
US side abandoned all bases and forward outposts in the Nurestan area after the devastating defeat at the
Battle of Wanat,
allowing the Pakistan Taliban to acquire a new free-fire zone within
Afghanistan, from which to harass Pakistani forces.
Cooperation among
the TTP, the Pak Army and the US Army has created this situation and
given all sides the excuse to keep the fight going, in order to expand
it into a three-sided conflagration, which can only be resolved with
overwhelming US air power and Special Forces mobilization.
Hang on, Pakistan and Afghanistan; It’s going to be a very rough ride.
* Official says 600 terrorists attacked border villages of Nusrat
Dara
and Kharo, fighting soldiers and pro-government tribal militia
ISLAMABAD/PESHAWAR:
Up to 600 terrorists from Afghanistan attacked two Pakistani villages
on Wednesday, officials said, the latest in a campaign of large-scale
raids on civilians and security forces.
Terrorists stormed the
border villages of Nusrat Dara and Kharo in Upper Dir region, fighting
soldiers and pro-government tribal militia.
“According to reports
from the two villages, between 550-600 terrorists launched the attack
at around 5 in the morning and the fighting continued for several
hours,” police official Abdul Sattar told Reuters.
Another
official said four pro-government tribesmen who fought along with troops
were wounded in the attack. Paramilitary troops and police were sent to
the villages in Upper Dir district to help armed tribesmen there who
were trying to fend off the insurgents, local police official Gul Fazal
Khan said. The terrorists torched two schools and a mosque in the
village of Nusrat Dara, and destroyed a school in the adjoining village
of Saro Kili, said Ghulam Muhammad, a top government official in Upper
Dir.
They used rockets, mortars and heavy machine guns along with
assault rifles. Security forces killed three terrorists and captured
three others during the fighting, he said. Two members of a militia
fighting the terrorists were killed and two others wounded, he added.
Information from the area is difficult to verify independently because it is remote and dangerous.
Separately,
Pakistan-based terrorists attacked troops in another tribal region of
North Waziristan on Wednesday. Intelligence officials said troops backed
by helicopter gunships killed three terrorists and wounded five in the
firefight. Five soldiers were also wounded.
Pakistan says more
than 55 soldiers have been killed in several attacks from across the
border over the past month. The raids have raised tension between the
neighbours as they battle protracted insurgencies by Taliban and al
Qaeda-linked terrorists.
Pakistani Taliban fighters who fled to
Afghanistan in the face of army offensives have joined allies in
Afghanistan to regroup and threaten Pakistan’s border regions again,
analysts say.
Pakistan blames Afghanistan for giving refuge to
terrorists on its side of the border, leaving its troops vulnerable to
counter-attack when it chases them out of the tribal areas and into
Afghanistan.
Kabul in turn has blamed Pakistan for killing dozens of civilians in weeks of cross-border shelling.
ASADABAD: Up to 33 police and five civilians were killed in fighting
after Taliban crossed over from Pakistan and attacked a remote region in
eastern Afghanistan, an official said on Wednesday. Nuristan provincial
governor Jamaluddin Badr said about 40 rebels also died in the two days
of clashes that followed weeks of tit-for-tat allegations of
cross-border attacks that have fanned diplomatic tensions. But,
Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry contradicted the toll, saying 12
policemen had died and another five were wounded.
Dozens of rebels who
began crossing the border from Pakistan on Tuesday triggered the fight,
Badr told AFP, attacking police posts in the Kamdesh district of
Nuristan. “The report we have now from the area is that 33 border police
and five civilians, two of them women, have been killed,” he said. He
said most of the dead rebels were Pakistan Taliban.
The Interior
Ministry said that “dozens” of rebels were killed in a clearance
operation that lasted several hours, 12 of them Pakistanis. “The
situation in the border areas of Kamdesh district has returned to
normal,” it said. The escalating conflict in the rugged border zone
between Afghanistan and Pakistan has forced more than 200 Afghan
families to flee so far.
