Pakistan’s Army Captures Taliban Stronghold in South Waziristan

Pakistan’s army said it captured a Taliban stronghold at Sararogha in South Waziristan as troops try to complete an offensive to clear fighters from the region before winter starts next month.

“Security forces have commenced sanitization of Sararogha” and are clearing the area of explosive devices, the army said in a statement yesterday. Pakistan says the offensive in South Waziristan has cut off escape routes to prevent the Taliban from fleeing in large numbers.

The Taliban denied their forces are being defeated, saying they are withdrawing in order to fight a “long war,” the Associated Press reported yesterday, citing a spokesman for the group.

The army began its largest operation against militants in the tribal region bordering Afghanistan last month. The offensive provoked suicide bombings and attacks that have killed more than 300 people.

“There is no place for the Taliban in Pakistan,” the Associated Press of Pakistan cited Interior Minister Rehman Malik as saying in a radio interview yesterday in Islamabad. “The entire nation has said no to the Taliban.”

Fifty-one percent of people supported the government’s offensive, according to a poll by the Gilani Research Foundation conducted by Gallup Pakistan, the Dawn newspaper reported yesterday on its Web site. Thirteen percent of more than 2,700 people surveyed across the country opposed the military action and 36 percent were undecided, the newspaper said. It didn’t give a margin of error for the poll.

Stocks Rise

Pakistan stocks rose for the first day in six yesterday with the benchmark Karachi Stock Exchange 100 Index gaining 0.8 percent. The gauge fell 5.4 percent in the previous five trading sessions, driven down by the resurgence of terrorist attacks, including a suicide bombing in Rawalpindi Nov. 2 that killed 35 people queuing outside a bank.

“We are prepared for a long war,” AP cited Azam Tariq, a Taliban spokesman, as saying by telephone yesterday. “The areas we are withdrawing from, and the ones the army is claiming to have won, are being vacated by us.’

The move is part of the Taliban’s strategy to draw the army into a trap deep inside South Waziristan, he said.

Accounts of the fighting are difficult to confirm as Pakistan bars foreigners from the tribal areas and local journalists have been forced out by the government and Taliban.

Pakistan’s government earlier this week offered cash rewards of $5 million for the capture of Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud and 18 of his fighters.

The United Nations said two days ago it is withdrawing some international workers from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas that include Waziristan and North West Frontier Province, leaving only those vital for emergency work.

As many as 300,000 people fleeing the fighting have arrived in the Tank and Dera Ismail Khan area and “around 25,000 more are expected to arrive in the next few weeks,” Khalid Fayaz Khan, director of the Fida Welfare Organization, a charity working with those displaced from South Waziristan, said in a telephone interview yesterday.