Pakistan troops attack Taliban stronghold, half million flee

Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 12:14 AM Posted by Beijing News


Pakistani commandos dropped into a Taliban stronghold in Swat valley Tuesday, stepping up a punishing offensive against militants that has now displaced more than half a million people.

Frightened civilians have streamed out of three northwest districts ripped apart by fighting, with the UN refugee agency announcing that 501,496 stranded people had registered with authorities since May 2.

Airborne troops Tuesday opened a new front in Swat's northern mountains, the suspected stronghold of firebrand Taliban commander Maulana Fazlullah and his top aides behind a nearly two-year uprising that has devastated the area.

"Today Pakistan army heli-borne troops have landed in the valley of Peochar and their mission is to conduct search-and-destroy operations," Major General Athar Abbas told a news conference.

Military officials said the troop landings, around 65 kilometres 40 miles northwest of the main Swat town of Mingora, were the first such assault during the latest US-backed offensive to crush the Taliban in the district.

Attack helicopters also shelled suspected Taliban hideouts in Malam Jabba, once popular for its pristine ski slopes, a military official said.

Pakistan has pounded Taliban training camps, hideouts and logistic centres in the northwest for 16 days in what Islamabad calls a fight to eliminate militants, branded by Washington as the greatest terror threat to the West.

"So far 751 militants have been killed in operations at Lower Dir, Buner and Swat," said Abbas. Of those, 402 have been killed in Swat, he added.

The spokesman said 29 security force personnel had been killed and 77 wounded in the offensives, which began late last month.

In Buner, artillery shelling killed 13 militants late Tuesday, a security spokesman said. None of the death tolls are independently verifiable.

The scale of the humanitarian crisis gripping Pakistan worsened Tuesday, as the number of registered displaced jumped from just over 360,000 late Sunday to half a million, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said.

"This is only a portion of people who would have fled," said Ariane Rummery, a UNHCR spokeswoman, attributing the leap in those fleeing to a brief lifting of a curfew in Swat on Sunday.

The new refugees join another 500,000 civilians who fled bouts of fighting in Pakistan's troubled North West Frontier Province last year.

Pakistan's military said the fresh displacements pushed to 1.3 million the total number displaced by the fighting in the northwest.

The UN's World Food Programme WFP said it was doubling its shipments of emergency food to the newly displaced, but warned that more funds were needed to feed the stranded over the next two to three months.

Rights groups urged Pakistan and the Taliban to avoid civilian casualties, and local doctors who have fled the onslaught say Swat's main hospital is closed and that the wounded cannot be treated there because there is no electricity.

"Winning the war but also the peace in Swat can only be achieved by minimising civilian suffering," said Brad Adams, Asia director at the US-based Human Rights Watch.

Extremist attacks have killed at least 1,800 people across nuclear-armed Pakistan in less than two years and around 2,000 soldiers have died in battles with Islamist militants since 2002.





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