Pakistan prepares for new offensive
Pakistani forces have given tribesmen in a new cluster of remote hideouts along the Afghan border an April 20 deadline to hand over al-Qaida terrorists or face a fierce crackdown by thousands of troops.
Critics, however, said announcing the deadline made it easy for terrorists to flee ahead of the operation, as they did last month when Pakistani forces allowed a top al-Qaida terrorist to get away in South Waziristan.
This time, Pakistani forces have shifted their focus to North Waziristan, zeroing in on a group of mud compounds along a forbidding mountain range straddling the Afghan border in the forested area of Shawal.
“There are possibilities of an operation in Shawal,” Brig Mahmood Shah, chief of security for the tribal regions, said in the northwestern city of Peshawar. He said some militants in Shawal appeared to have escaped the earlier operation, 25 miles to the south. He gave no specifics.
“We have thousands of troops, not hundreds, but I can’t give operational details,” he said.
Shah said intelligence indicated foreign terrorists had used Shawal in the past and that troops also were concerned about militant activity in two other North Waziristan towns – Shakai and Hamrang, and the village of Makin in South Waziristan.
The government assault in March on al-Qaida suspects holed up in South Waziristan was costly, and failed to net any major terrorists. The military acknowledged it lost at least 50 men, and officials say privately the casualty toll might have been twice that. At least a dozen civilians were killed.
The government says a top al-Qaida militant, the Uzbek terror leader Tahir Yuldash, was injured but managed to escape, possibly through a mile-long tunnel that led out of the siege site to a dry riverbed near the frontier. About 160 militants were arrested, and 63 killed. Hundreds escaped.
North and South Waziristan have long been suspected hideouts for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his number two, Ayman al-Zawahri. Senior Pakistani officials initially thought they had al-Zawahri surrounded in March.
