TANG KHATA A massive battle with Islamist militants in an obscure Pakistani tribal region is proving to be pivotal to the countrys fight against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, AFP reports.

The six-week army operation in the remote region of Bajaur on the Afghan border is suspected to have sparked furious extremists into bombing the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad just over a week ago, army officials say.

The military says Bajaur is where it faces the stiffest resistance since joining the US-led “war on terror” in 2001.

Troops backed by helicopter gunships and fighter jets have struggled to push forward in the face of bunkers, tunnel networks and organised defences constructed by extremists.

Several blown-up Pakistani tanks littered the roads during a recent trip for journalists arranged by the military. US-built Cobra gunships could be seen pounding insurgent positions with cannon.

“This is at the centre,” said Major General Tariq Khan, head of the paramilitary Frontier Corps force, which is leading the fighting.

The operation should be completed in another month and a half, Khan told reporters, but added “If we do not take any action it will become an independent agency spreading out terror in all directions.”The nuclear-armed nations new civilian government launched the Bajaur offensive in August, largely in response to US pressure to stop militants attacking foreign troops in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani military says that since then 1,000 extremists have been killed, including Al-Qaedas operational commander in Bajaur, Egyptian Abu Saeed Al-Masri. At least 27 troops have also died.

Pakistani security officials say it is the first time they have gone “full steam” since then-President Pervez Musharraf pushed troops into South Waziristan, the most southerly of the seven semi-autonomous tribal zones, in 2003 to tackle militants who fled the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

Operations there and in North Waziristan ended in controversial peace deals with militants that angered Washington and allowed the rebels to regroup, increasingly in Bajaur.

There, followers of Osama bin Ladens deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who escaped an air strike in Bajaur in 2006, joined forces with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan group of South Waziristan-based Baitullah Mehsud, officials say.

The former government blamed Mehsud for the December 2007 assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto, wife of current President Asif Ali Zardari.

But the cost has been high in Bajaur.

“Pakistans army has never faced this level of resistance since it launched operations in the tribal areas (in 2003),” a senior military official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

“Every day fighter jets are used, every day Cobras are used, yet we cannot break their strongholds.” Dozens of civilians have died in the fighting, while about a third of Bajaurs population of one million has been displaced.

In the abandoned village of Tang Khata, where troops drove out insurgents blocking the road to Bajaurs main city of Khar, reporters saw gutted houses filled with debris and dried cornfields left unharvested.

Meanwhile analysts say the militants have also appeared to spread the violence back into “mainland Pakistan” with the suicide truck bomb attack on the Islamabad Marriott, which left at least 60 people dead.

The rebels cannot afford to lose Bajaurs strategic location.

To the east is the restive former tourist region of Swat, and trouble is flaring south, through Mohmand tribal area, into the major city of Peshawar.
On the Afghan side is a long frontier with the Taliban hotspot of Kunar province.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said earlier this month that Washington was “encouraged” by the Bajaur operation, but US military incursions into Pakistan have in fact increased since it began.

Pakistani military chief General Ashfaq Kayani urged US counterpart Admiral Mike Mullen to show “patience” with his strategy of tackling Bajaur-based militants who are hitting targets in Pakistan.

After that the focus will be on Waziristan for the main anti-US extremists, officials said.