Pakistan Pounds Taliban, Swelling the Tide of Refugees

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The Pakistani Army pressed a surprisingly vigorous offensive on Friday against the Taliban militants who had taken control of a broad swath of territory northwest of the capital, sending tens of thousands of Pakistanis fleeing the fighting.

The exodus — by truck, car, foot and horse cart — reached close to 200,000 people, forcing relief workers to erect new rows of tents in camps along the clotted road running south from the Swat Valley, the scene of the heaviest fighting. More trouble loomed: Relief officials said as many as 300,000 people were moving or preparing to flee.

The humanitarian crisis unfolded as the Pakistani Army moved ahead with what it described as an all-out attack on the Taliban militants in Swat, the epicenter of a power struggle over months between government forces and the militants. Army officers said they were confronting a force of about 4,000 militants, who took advantage of a peace agreement in February to seize control of much of the district and its government buildings.

There have been a number of indications over the past week that the Pakistani Army has finally decided to confront the militants forcefully, though previous hopes, dating back five years, have always been dashed. The uncertainties included whether the army, even if it wanted to, was competent enough to deliver a deathblow to the militants or whether defeating them would come at such a high cost to civilians that it would further erode public support.

Pakistanis in the area said the Taliban had so far held on to every neighborhood they had seized in the previous days and months. Witnesses said Friday that the insurgents remained in control of Mingora, the district capital, and many parts of the districts of Buner and Lower Dir.

At the military’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas made few claims of territorial progress. He said that helicopters strafed militants in Swat over the previous 24 hours, and that 140 militants and 7 Pakistani soldiers had been killed.

“They are on the run and trying to block the exodus of innocent civilians by preventing their departure through coercion,” General Abbas said.

Militant resistance in neighboring Buner, just 60 miles from Islamabad, has decreased considerably, General Abbas said. He said the military had lifted a curfew in Buner to allow civilians to escape toward Mardan and other areas.

There was no way to verify General Abbas’s account; reporters and most outsiders have been blocked from the areas. The Pakistani government and the military, which has largely stood by as the Taliban insurgency has surged forward in recent months, have been under intense American pressure to take action against the militants.

A government official reached at his home in Mingora said many militants had been killed this week when Pakistani helicopter gunships attacked an emerald mine that sits on the approach to Mingora. Still, the government’s position was unchanged, the official said; it was clinging to only a small corner of Mingora. The mayor’s office and police headquarters were still in Taliban hands.

The official said electricity and water in the district capital were both gone. “Thousands of people are leaving,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear that he would be killed.

A Pakistani who spoke to his family in Mingora on Friday said they had confirmed that the Taliban remained in control of the city. He said the roads into the capital had been booby-trapped with land mines, and that in some places, like Matta, a Taliban stronghold, militants were blocking civilians from leaving.

Another Pakistani in Swat, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Taliban fighters had begun to loot local banks, including three on Thursday.

Some civilians fleeing the area said the Pakistani Army had imposed a round-the-clock curfew across much of the embattled area, preventing thousands of people from leaving. Those people would flee at the first chance, the refugees said.

Pakistani soldiers gave out pamphlets accusing the Taliban of playing into the hands of so-called anti-Pakistan elements. “They are the same as Jewish forces who are against the existence and security of the country and wanted to create disturbance in the region,” read a leaflet, according to a report in Dawn, a prominent Pakistani newspaper.

Thousands of civilians continued to move Friday, many of them to three camps set up in the low-lying areas south of the battlefields. Officials with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees expressed alarm at the growing human tide, saying their workers had set up a series of centers to track the number of refugees and make it easier to help them. “Given the massive influx of people, this is not enough,” the office said in a statement.

The 200,000 people who have fled the stricken areas join the half-million others who have already left parts of the North-West Frontier Province, as well as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, because of fighting between the government and the Taliban, and because of the fear of missile strikes by remotely piloted American aircraft.

Refugees arriving Friday in Mardan had few kind words for the Taliban militants or their own government. One Pakistani woman, stepping from her tent in a camp at the outskirts of the city, said the fighting had succeeded only in ruining the lives of people with no hand in the conflict.

“We have nothing,” the woman said, standing amid a sea of other refugees. She arrived Friday with eight relatives. “We have no blankets and no food. The government is bombing us from the mountains, and the Taliban is shooting at us from the city.

“The army and the Taliban are not killing each other — they are friends,” the woman said. “They are only killing civilians. When civilians are killed, the government says they have killed a bunch of terrorists.”