PESHAWAR, July 18: Seventeen soldiers were killed on Wednesday after security forces fought fierce gunbattles with militants, triggered by two separate ambushes in Ghazlamai and Mir Ali areas, the army said.

Seventeen soldiers died and 12 wounded in the first ambush by militants in Ghazlamai area.

(According to an agency report, the army said it had killed 12 militants in the clash at Ghazlamai and another five in a firefight about six hours later in Mir Ali. There were no military casualties from the second clash, the army said).

“It was a classical guerrilla tactic,” a senior government official said while describing the first militant attack.

“The militants occupied heights, first triggered a roadside bomb to halt the military convoy and then opened fire on them,” the official said. Military spokesman Maj-Gen Waheed Arshad confirmed the incident but said that a number of militants were also killed in retaliatory fire.

“The militants took away bodies of their comrades,” he told Dawn by telephone.

A security official said that militants struck a military convoy with a remote-controlled bomb and later opened indiscriminate fire on soldiers, killing 17 of them and wounding 12 others.

The attack took place in the Ghazlamai area of Datakhel tehsil, some 40 kilometres west of here, at about 10.30am. The convoy was heading from Lawara Mandi, near the border with Afghanistan, to Miramshah. The bodies and the injured were shifted to hospitals in Bannu and Peshawar by helicopters.

Militants have intensified attacks on the security forces since a local Taliban Shura announced last week that it had scrapped a peace agreement with the government.

As attacks on security forces mount in the troubled region, the government has convened a 45-member inter-tribal jirga in Peshawar on Thursday to launch a fresh bid to revive the now defunct September 5 peace agreement in North Waziristan.

Fata Additional Chief Secretary Javed Iqbal said that he was confident that negotiations would help revive the 10-month-old peace agreement.

“It is in the collective interest of us all. It is in their (tribal people’s) interest and it is in our interest. Tribesmen are very pragmatic people and I am confident they will return to negotiations,” he said.

The militants said they would not revive the peace agreement unless the government withdrew troops from checkpoints and stop military operations.

Also on Wednesday morning, three civilians and a soldier were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded at Garam Chashma bridge on the Bannu-Miramshah road. Witnesses said that bomb went off when a convoy was passing through the bridge.

However, the bomb hit a private car and a military truck in the rear of the convoy, wounding three civilians and a soldier. A teenaged boy, Ferhanullah, who was bathing in a nearby spring, sustained bullet injuries when soldiers opened indiscriminate fire. The wounded boy was shifted to a hospital in Miramshah.

Militants fired five rockets at a paramilitary fort in Miramshah town on Tuesday night, but they missed the target. Officials said that a rocket landed at the airfield, while two rockets fell near residential quarters. Another rocket struck a petrol pump near the fort.

An improvised explosive device went off outside the resident of former minister of state Malik Ajmal Khan on Tuesday night, which did not cause any casualty.

Our Correspondent adds: A pro-government militant group on Wednesday claimed to have captured a teenaged boy outside the residence of their commander in Wana, South Waziristan Agency, and recovered explosive from his possession.

Militants claimed that the boy belonging to the Bajaur Agency was roaming outside the residence of the pro-government militant commander Maulvi Nazir. They said that a vest meant for suicide bombing was also recovered from the boy.

Maulvi Nazir, who is enjoying the support of the government and his tribal supporters, had launched armed campaign against militants from the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan in the Ahmadzai Wazir dominated areas of the South Waziristan Agency a few months ago.

AFP ADDS: “Seventeen soldiers were martyred and more than a dozen miscreants were killed when troops returned fire,” Maj-Gen Waheed Arshad said.