New York Times
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — After a week of strong criticism here and abroad over its inaction, the Pakistani military deployed fighter jets and helicopter gunships to flush out hundreds of Taliban militants who overran the strategic district of Buner last week, the military said Tuesday.
The campaign began Tuesday after government forces completed a two-day operation against Taliban militants in a neighboring district, Dir, the military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Abbas, said.
The Taliban advance into Buner, just 60 miles from the capital, not only brought heavy pressure on the military from the United States and other Western countries. But it has also fortified a growing consensus among Pakistani politicians and the general public that the Taliban have gone too far and that the military should act to contain the spread of the insurgency.
Under threat of military action, the Taliban staged a show withdrawal from Buner at the end of last week, Major General Abbas said. But he said the militants were in fact trying to expand the space they control beyond the valley of Swat, which borders Dir and Buner.
At a news conference, he played three tapes of telephone intercepts of the main Taliban leader, Mullah Fazlullah, talking to one of his commanders about making a show withdrawal for the media while telling their men to put away their weapons and lie low.
“In Buner people are living under coercion and in fear,” General Abbas said. “There was no reason to intimidate people in Buner, and the militants started intimidating people and forcibly recruiting young people to take them back to Swat for military training.”
“The government acted with patience but eventually there was no other way except to launch an operation,” General Abbas added.
Earlier in the day the chief official at the Interior Ministry, Rehman Malik, gave an indication of the tougher government stance toward the Taliban, saying that the Taliban had ignored repeated government requests to leave Buner.
“I warn them to vacate the area,” he told reporters. “We are not going to spare them. Action will be taken if anyone tries to block our efforts to re-establish the writ of the government in Buner and other areas.”
Several events contributed to the shift among politicians and the public. The televised flogging of a girl in Swat by the Taliban several weeks ago shocked many in the country. A radical cleric, Sufi Mohammed, who helped negotiate the peace deal in Swat, said recently that Pakistani institutions such as parliament and the high courts were un-Islamic, angering politicians from all parties.
Finally, the militants’ move into several new districts last week girded the Pakistani army to move against the Taliban.
The military may have a difficult fight ahead. The Taliban have already been digging trenches and fortified positions, Major General Abbas said.
There are also indications that the fighting in Dir has been heavier than Pakistani officials have acknowledged and that the civilian cost has been high. The military said some 70 militants had been killed over three days of fighting.
But over 30,000 civilians have fled their homes in the region and reported seeing bodies lying in the streets and the fields as they fled, Amnesty International said Tuesday.
Officials in a local hospital in the town of Timergara, in Dir, confirmed that five civilians had died, including two women and one girl, said Amnesty, which has been in contact with local Pakistani human rights organizations.
“Neither the Taliban nor the government forces seem to care about the well-being of the residents of Lower Dir,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific director in a statement.
“The Taliban show no compunction about using civilian areas as combat zones,” he added, “even knowing that the military will respond with indiscriminate long-distance shelling and aerial bombardment.”
In the main town of Mingora, in Swat, the Taliban distributed fliers warning journalists of dire consequences if they continued reporting that criticized the Taliban or accused them of sabotaging the peace deal to introduce Islamic law, or sharia, in the area.
The fliers, which were issued by the Commander of the Suicide Bombers of the Taliban Movement of Swat, said journalists who did not cease such would be taken before sharia courts and would face “horrible consequences.”
At least two Pakistani news agencies ordered their reporters out of Swat on learning of the fliers. Four local journalists have been killed in Swat in recent months and editors said they were taking the threats very seriously.
Dir is a critical mountainous region that joins Swat to the restive tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan, and Buner lies to the south and east opening the way towards the Indus River and the capital Islamabad.
By establishing government control in Dir, the military will have blocked off an escape and resource supply route to the militants in Swat. But Buner is a much bigger task. The military estimates several hundred militants have infiltrated the district from Swat since last week.
No comments:
Post a Comment