PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Eight-year-old Amna Bibi was dressed in festive orange and headed to a wedding with her family when the car bomb exploded yesterday near a crowded market in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
A man scooped up the girl and dashed from the scene. It was too late.
"Our sister is dead," her older sister said as tears rolled down her cheeks at the hospital. "We are wrecked."
The bomb tore through a busy road in the heart of Peshawar, a city of more than 3 million. The force of the blast flipped a bus on its side, ripped apart a motorbike and flung charred debris down the street.
Pakistan has been rocked by almost weekly attacks by Islamic militants, but the sheer horror of yesterday's bombing -- which killed 49 people and wounded more than 100 -- spurred the government to declare it would launch a new offensive against militant strongholds along the Afghan border.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the militants had left the government "no other option" but to hit back into the rugged mountains of South Waziristan, part of the lawless tribal belt where al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden may be hiding.
"We will have to proceed," he told a local television station. "All roads are leading to South Waziristan."
The United States has been pressuring Pakistan to take strong action against insurgents who are using its soil as a base for attacks in neighbouring Afghanistan. A push into South Waziristan could be risky for the army, which was beaten back on three previous offensives there.
But the army may have been emboldened this year by a reasonably successful military campaign in the Swat Valley and adjoining Buner district and by the death in a U.S. missile strike of Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.
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