On a remote, dusty plain dotted with mud fortresses and ringed by steep mountains, Pakistani soldiers are waging their fiercest battle yet in the 2 1/2-year-old war against terrorism.
At least 100 prisoners have been taken and casualties are mounting after five days of fighting between 7,000 Pakistani troops and an estimated 400 to 500 local Pashtun tribesmen and suspected foreign militants that showed no sign of abating Saturday.
Pakistani officials are backing down from speculation that senior Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is among the fighters hunkered down in a cluster of fortified mud-brick compounds west of Wana, the administrative capital of the semiautonomous tribal agency of South Waziristan.
Instead, officials said, it appears that soldiers who set out Tuesday to detain three local tribesmen suspected of helping Al Qaeda fugitives stumbled into a stronghold of Al Qaeda-allied Central Asian militants.
“They are extremely professional fighters for whom life is meaningless,” Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, the commander of Pakistan’s army forces in the border area, told journalists flown into the area by the Pakistani military Saturday. In 29 previous operations in the area, “we have never encountered this kind of resistance,” he said.
The remote region of South Waziristan, bordering Afghanistan and inhabited by fiercely conservative Pashtun tribes, has long been regarded as Al Qaeda territory, a sanctuary for the remnants of the network that fled the U.S.-led onslaught against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Continued fierce resistance by the encircled militants means it is likely they are still protecting “a high-value target,” Hussain said. Radio communications intercepted by Pakistani forces suggest the fugitive is more likely to be a Chechen or Uzbek than an Arab, he said.
It is also possible that a senior leader escaped on the first day of the fighting, when a black SUV stormed past local paramilitaries as they moved into the area, officials said. Two vehicles accompanying the SUV were later found destroyed, but the black vehicle with darkened windows got away.
Subsequent radio intercepts, also in Central Asian languages, suggested that an “important person” was wounded in the getaway, Hussain said.
“The intercepts said that the gentleman is wounded and it would require four people to handle him and 11 or 12 to protect him,” Hussain said. “It was somebody important.”
Hussain described the speculation surrounding al-Zawahiri as “conjecture” prompted by the fierce resistance encountered by Pakistani soldiers.
Officials won’t say how many soldiers have been killed so far, but it is believed that the army has suffered heavy casualties. At least 34 Pakistani soldiers have been reported killed by local newspapers, and unconfirmed reports say 12 others are missing and possibly being held hostage by the militants. The army says it has killed at least 24 militants, though it says it has no information about their nationalities.
The push into the tribal areas carries risks for Pakistan’s government, and Islamic opposition parties Saturday called for demonstrations to protest the army’s offensive. There were also reports Saturday that 13 civilians were killed when Pakistani soldiers fired on five vehicles attempting to break the army siege, something likely to further inflame tribal hostility against the government.
Bin Laden rumors
U.S. officials have applauded Pakistan’s recent push into South Waziristan. Osama bin Laden on several occasions has been reported to be hiding in the area, though there is no suggestion that he is in the vicinity of this battle.
Twelve miles away, beyond a jagged ridge of steep mountains, lies the Afghan border and the nearest American base at Shkin, which regularly comes under attack from Islamic militants based on the Pakistani side of the border.
Although some of those militants are Arabs, a number of fighters belonging to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a radical Islamic group that had close relations with the Taliban regime and with bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, are known to be hiding in the area.
Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who was instrumental in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, also was reported to be in the area, and Hussain did not rule out the possibility that he is still somewhere in the tribal agency.
The general said he plans to deploy more Pakistani troops to the region in light of “maturing intelligence” that there are other locations where terrorists may be hiding.
“I don’t want to forewarn them, but these people are there,” he said. “The momentum of this operation will continue.”
Front line of terror war
The brief and closely supervised visit by journalists was organized by the army and offered a rare opportunity to enter the deeply conservative tribal area. The region has been on the front line of the terror war since the collapse of the Taliban in 2001 sent hundreds of Arab, Central Asian and Afghan fighters fleeing across the border to seek sanctuary with sympathetic tribesmen.
Outsiders normally are prohibited from visiting the semiautonomous tribal areas without an invitation from the local tribes, and until recently even the presence of Pakistani government officials and soldiers was subject to restrictions.
That changed after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Pervez Musharraf switched sides from the Taliban to support the U.S.-led war on terrorism. Under intense American pressure, Pakistan moved troops into the seven tribal agencies bordering Afghanistan to intercept fleeing Al Qaeda fighters.
Recently, Pakistan has come under renewed pressure to do more to prevent a resurgence of attacks against U.S. and Afghan forces blamed on fighters operating out of bases in Pakistan’s tribal frontier. Pakistan is coordinating its efforts with U.S. forces across the border in Afghanistan as part of a renewed effort to track down Al Qaeda’s fugitive leaders.
