More than 40 people have been killed in two days of fighting in a north-west Pakistani valley as troops seek to wipe out militants trying to enforce Taliban-style rule, the military and witnesses said on Wednesday.
Major Amjad Iqbal, an army spokesperson, said 17 militants were killed in Swat valley’s Shangla district in gun battles overnight, taking the death toll since Tuesday to 40.
Four civilians from the same family were killed by a mortar bomb on Wednesday elsewhere in the valley, a relative said.
Troops are using helicopter gunships and artillery to evict rebels led by hard-line cleric Maulana Fazlullah from the scenic valley in North-West Frontier Province, where weeks of fighting have killed about 300 people.
”We are advancing towards Alpuri, where militants are in control,” Iqbal said, referring to a town in the Shangla district, adding militants had fired several rockets into an army camp in the adjacent Swat district, wounding two soldiers.
He had no information about any civilian casualties.
Thousands of people have fled the area since the army stepped up operations last week after police failed to prevent a militant build-up.
Daulat Mand, a resident in a village in the militant stronghold of Kabal, where a rebel attack on an army camp triggered fighting that continued until dawn, said four of his relatives were killed by a mortar bomb.
”The bomb killed my aunt and three cousins and wounded my uncle and two others,” he said.
Four civilians were killed in Shangla by a similar mortar bomb attack on Tuesday. Military officials say insurgents are using civilian premises to launch attacks on security forces.
Fighting erupted between troops and militants in October after Fazlullah used an illegal FM radio station to call for jihad, or holy war, after an assault on a militant mosque in the capital, Islamabad, in July.
Militants have infiltrated from strongholds on the Afghan border to support Fazlullah in recent weeks, while the country’s focus has been on President Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of emergency rule and suspension of the Constitution in an apparent bid to hold on to power. — Reuters