Pakistan braces for more violence after suicide blast kills 24
troops
PAKISTAN: Pakistan on Sunday braced for more backlash violence
to the army’s deadly raid on a hardline mosque last week after a suicide
car bomb attack killed at least 24 troops in an Afghan border area.
Pakistani army trucks carrying more troops rumbled into northwestern
mountain areas after President Pervez Musharraf last week vowed to crush
extremists and “root them out from every corner of the country.”
There were unconfirmed reports of fighting between militants and
government troops in the Swat valley of North West Frontier Province
early Sunday.
Pakistan’s radical Islamic minority has called for “holy war,”
infuriated by the siege of the pro-Taliban Red Mosque in the capital and
the army assault that ended it, claiming 103 lives through the week,
mostly of militants.
The interior ministry said the bodies of 10 unidentified foreigners
and seven children were among the charred remains found in the
devastated mosque complex, according to a state media report published
in the Dawn daily.
In Saturday’s suicide blast in North Waziristan, the attacker rammed
an explosives-packed car into a paramilitary convoy, also wounding more
than 20 troops, said chief military spokesman Major General Waheed
Arshad.
Besides the blast and a spate of other attacks on troops in recent
days, there has been political fallout in the world’s second-largest
Muslim nation amid the heightened tensions triggered by the Red Mosque
raid.
Meanwhile a blast ripped through a military convoy Sunday killing at
least two Pakistani troops and wounding up to 40 in an Afghan border
area, police and military officials said.
“Two soldiers were killed and some 30 wounded in the attack,” said
Swat district police chief Mohammad Iqbal, who was on the way to the
scene and said some of the wounded were in serious condition.
Chief military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad earlier said 40
people were wounded when the convoy was hit by an improvised explosive
device as it passed the town of Matta, and that the injured were being
evacuated.
Qazi Hussain Ahmed — powerful head of the six-party Islamic alliance
the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal — said he would resign from parliament to
protest the army raid and the ongoing army build-up in border regions.
In North Waziristan, pro-Taliban militant commander Abdullah Farhad
threatened to end a peace deal struck last September between the
government and tribal leaders unless the army left newly-set up
checkpoints by Sunday.
“If the government troops do not vacate the checkposts by July 15, we
will end the existing peace agreement with the government and launch a
guerrilla war,” Farhad told AFP by phone from an undisclosed location
Saturday.
The United States has raised pressure on its ally Musharraf, the army
chief who grabbed power in a coup eight years ago, to do more to hunt
down Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents hiding in Pakistan’s rugged Afghan
border lands.
New US intelligence reports suggest Al-Qaeda is gaining strength and
has established a safe haven in remote tribal areas of western Pakistan
for training and plotting new attacks, the Washington Post said last
week.
White House national security advisor Stephen Hadley said Musharraf
had failed to contain al-Qaeda and said the plan to give tribal leaders
more autonomy “has not worked the way it should have,” speaking on US
television.
General Musharraf has in recent days sent additional soldiers and
equipment into parts of the troubled North West Frontier Province.
“Troops have been deployed in Swat district and in Dera Ismail Khan
following instructions by President Musharraf to beef up security to
counter the threat of extremist forces in the region,” a military
official said.
Pakistan-Afghanistan, Sunday, AFP |
