September 27, 2008	Saturday	Ramazan 26, 1429

TANG KHATTA, Sept 26: Security forces have killed up to 1,000 militants during a month-long operation in Bajaur Agency, Frontier Corps Inspector-General Maj-Gen Tariq Khan said on Friday.

Between 500 and 1,000 militants had been killed since the beginning of the month, while 62 soldiers had been killed and 112 wounded, he told reporters flown by helicopter to Khar for a briefing on the military operation launched in August against militants who had taken control of most of the region.

“When we got into the intensity of battle it was like putting your hand in a wasps’ hive. Everything was exploding around you,” he said.

He termed Bajaur the “centre of gravity” for the militants and said 65 per cent of the problem would be eliminated if they were defeated in the region. “If they lose here, they’ve lost almost everything.”

There are around 9,000 army and FC soldiers deployed in Bajaur.

Taken to the village of Tang Khatta, a few kilometres away from the regional headquarters, the journalists saw helicopter gunships firing on militant positions among mud-walled compounds surrounded by fields of maize.

Tang Khatta had been a militant stronghold. There was plenty of evidence of the fierce fight the militants put up and their remnants were still resisting.

A destroyed tank lay beside a road, shell casings littered the ground and walls were blown away by artillery and rocket fire.

Standing behind the village’s metre-thick outer wall, an officer, Col Javaid Baloch, described how his men fought house-to-house and apologised for not being able to show the journalists more as the gunfire crackled outside.

He said the militants took cover in caves and dried-up streams whenever attacked. “I wish I could take you there but they are in the nullahs.”

A military spokesman later informed the journalists that three officers had been critically wounded in the fighting on Friday, including a major who had lost both legs and another who lost any eye.

Maj-Gen Tariq Khan’s previous command was in South Waziristan, where his forces bottled up the leader of the banned Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud.

The FC commander said the conflict in Waziristan as more of a “tribal war”, whereas the situation in Bajaur had more “international linkages”.

He said his men had taken 90 prisoners.

He said he wasn’t sure if any top Al Qaeda figures were in Bajaur, but seven or eight Taliban ‘commanders’ and a couple of known Egyptian militants were among those killed.

Also killed were two sons of the region’s top Taliban commander, Faqir Mohammad, who had also been wounded, he said.

He put the militants’ strength at around 2,000, among them Afghans, Uzbeks and Arabs.

Despite heavy casualties the militants’ fighting strength had not gone down appreciably because reinforcements had arrived from other parts of the northwest and from Afghanistan, he said.

“I personally feel that trained squads have been moved in,” he said.

“My timeframe for Bajaur is from one and a half to two months to bring about stability,” he said.—Agencies