Pakistan to launch another major assault against Taliban next week

Mar 2, 2010, 14:22 GMT

Damadola, Pakistan - Pakistan is preparing to launch a major army offensive against Taliban militants in another restive tribal district along the Afghan border next week, a senior security official said on Tuesday.

The planned military action in Orakzai, one of the seven districts in Pakistan's militancy-plagued tribal region, would aim at flushing out an estimated 1,000 hard core Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives involved in dozens of suicide attacks across Pakistan.

'(The) Orakzai operation is about a week away,' said a senior official of the Frontier Corps (FC), the paramilitary force spearheading the offensives against Islamist insurgents in Pakistan's north-western region.

'Around 1,000 Taliban are in Orakzai,' the official informed a correspondent from the German Press Agency dpa on condition of anonymity during a guided tour for journalists to Bajaur tribal district, where the government claims to have recently completed a 'successful operation' against the militants.

Major General Tariq Khan, the head of the FC, confirmed that the operation in Orakzai district is in the offing, but he gave no exact date.

The planned assault in Orakzai comes weeks after Pakistan announced victory in the Taliban heartland of South Waziristan, another tribal district that had turned into a major hub of local as well as international terrorism.

Thousands of rebels in South Waziristan have fled to neighbouring districts, including Orakzai, following the security action that left tens of thousands tribesmen homeless.

'We are going to defeat Taliban everywhere in the tribal areas,' Khan told reporters during a briefing in Bajaur's remote village of Damadola, which the troops captured only last week after intensive fighting with the militants.

Pakistani troops moved into Bajaur in August 2008 and claimed victory in February last year, apparently without clearing the entire area. The forces returned early this year to completely flush out the militants.

The latest battles killed 75 militants, taking the overall Taliban death toll to 2,200 in Bajaur since 2008, another senior FC official, Colonel Noman Saeed, told reporters. The security forces have lost 149 men.

According to Khan, the Damadola area served as a headquarter of the militants, who used 156 caves that were developed to hide men and weapons to carry out cross border raids into the Afghan province of Kunar, located barely 10 kilometres away.