Violence in Pakistan's Swat as displaced head home

PESHAWAR, Pakistan— Pakistani troops killed six militants in the Swat valley, where the government has bussed home thousands of civilians displaced by a military offensive, officials said.
Pakistan says the pace of returns to the northwest district has quickened this week but fresh violence is likely to exacerbate fears about security after two months of fierce fighting between government forces and Taliban militants.
"Six militants were killed when troops retaliated and returned fire after a rebel attack on an army checkpost in Kabal town on Tuesday night," a military official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
A senior police official in Swat confirmed the incident in the northern part of the valley, once dubbed the Switzerland of Pakistan for its pristine mountain resorts but since overrun by a Taliban insurgency.
On Tuesday, the military reported killings in Swat for the first time in days, announcing that nine militants were shot dead in the last 24 hours.
Last week, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said it was safe to start sending home nearly two million people displaced by the conflict and that the military had "eliminated" the extremists.
The army launched its offensive under heavy US pressure in late April in Buner and Lower Dir districts, before besieging militants in neighbouring Swat, where the Taliban focused its two-year rebellion to enforce sharia law.
Officials said about 2,300 displaced families have so far returned to Swat and Buner since the government-organised returns process began Monday.
"A total of 1,534 families returned to Swat while 757 families headed back to Buner since the repatriation of displaced persons started," a spokesman for the government aid effort, Lieutenant Colonel Waseem Shahid, told AFP.
Azam Khan, a government emergency relief official, confirmed the same statistics but said it was difficult to calculate a precise number of people who have returned to hometowns, largely in southern Swat.
"However, we can say there are approximately eight to 10 people in a single family, living in the camps," Khan told AFP.
Pakistan says more than 1,700 militants and around 160 security personnel were killed in operations to crush the Taliban in northwest districts since late April, but the death tolls are impossible to verify independently.
The government says it has worked hard to restore electricity and running water in main towns since the fighting but analysts warn that much needs to be done to sustain the returnees particularly with Taliban leaders still at large.
In a video posted on jihadi web forums, Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri purportedly urged Pakistanis to support insurgents in their battle against a US-led "crusade" which he said threatened the country's existence.
In an English-language video called "My Muslim Brothers and Sisters in Pakistan," he said US intervention in Pakistan's military and politics could break up the nuclear-armed nation, according to the SITE Intelligence Group.
In Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, two policemen were killed and five wounded in a bomb blast in the town of Bannu on Wednesday, police said.
Islamist militants bitterly opposed to the government's alliance with the United States, whose troops are fighting a Taliban insurgency in neighbouring Afghanistan, carry out daily attacks on security forces in the northwest.