Pakistani Outposts Struck by Large Taliban Assault

[PureAryan]

Pakistani Outposts Struck by Large Taliban Assault​

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Taliban group forced into a remote border area by Pakistani military operations struck back Friday with a large and highly coordinated attack against the government’s paramilitary forces, Pakistani officials said.

A senior security official said about 150 militants initiated the simultaneous attacks on five security outposts near the Afghan border, killing 11 members of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps and wounding 9. The militants fought hand-to-hand battles with the Pakistani forces at two of the outposts in Mohmand Agency and assaulted the three others with machine guns and rockets, officials said.

The militants may have been trying to forestall new attacks by the military, which has swept them from other nearby tribal areas into a relatively small area of Mohmand Agency and threatened a new offensive.

“Frankly, we didn’t expect an attack of this scale and magnitude,” said the senior security official, who added that the Pakistani forces had received a warning of an impending assault.

As violence has flared in Mohmand in recent months, most of the attacks against government forces have been smaller scale ambushes of patrols or remote assaults using improvised bombs planted along roads.

The senior security official, who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said that 24 militants were killed in the hours of clashes, although only 8 militants’ bodies were shown to the local news media.

“Our assessment is based on militants’ intercepts and chatter,” the official said.

The United States has directed most of its drone attacks in Pakistan against the Haqqani network of the Afghan Taliban, one of the most lethal groups attacking NATO and allied forces in Afghanistan, as well as that group’s local Pakistani allies.

Pakistan, meanwhile, has been focusing its military operations against groups like the one in Mohmand, which has been attacking Pakistani forces and increasingly singling out civilians allied with the government.

A government official said that Taliban fighters in the area had now been driven into a small mountainous area of Mohmand that adjoins the Bajaur tribal area in Pakistan and Kunar Province in eastern Afghanistan.

The area offers easy escape routes into Afghanistan, which has allowed the militants to sometimes shelter there, the reverse of the movements of Haqqani fighters who take refugee in Pakistan between attacks in Afghanistan.

“All the bad guys are now there,” said Amjad Ali Khan, the administrator of the Mohmand region. “Kunar’s border region has gone to the dogs due to the absence of international forces there. These guys go there and come back to launch attacks on our forward positions.”

Kunar has a long, mountainous and remote border with Pakistan that is difficult to patrol fully. Some posts are staffed by coalition forces, while others are the responsibility of the Afghan border police.

Pakistani officials said that the authorities had planned an operation to flush militants from the remaining pockets of Mohmand, but delayed operations because of a lack of resources.

On Dec. 6, two suicide bombers dressed as police officers struck the administrative headquarters of Mohmand Agency, killing 43 people and wounding more than 60

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/world/asia/25pstan.html

 

[PureAryan]

It looks like i have posted this news twice by mistake, can the mods merge this thread with other one

My apology for this mistake