Taliban claim only 2 killed in its capture of Pak fort

NY Times:

Hundreds of Islamic militants attacked a paramilitary fort in Sararogha, in the restive South Waziristan tribal region in north-west Pakistan on Tuesday, killing 22 soldiers and taking several others hostage in a nearly six-hour battle, government intelligence agency officials and local officials said Wednesday.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the attack, said that 600 to 700 militants had attacked the Sararogha fort, firing rockets and mortars in a region where local and foreign militants have battled the Pakistani military.

Fifteen soldiers belonging to the South Waziristan Scouts, an official paramilitary militia, died in the battle, one intelligence official said.

Another local official said that the militants later beheaded at least seven other soldiers.

A spokesman for Tehreek-i-Taliban, an Islamic group that is sympathetic to the Taliban, said that it had carried out the attack and that it had killed 16 soldiers and captured 24, and that only two militants had been killed.

...

A spokesman for the militant group, Maulvi Umar, was quoted by Dawn, an English-language newspaper here, as saying by telephone that the militants who attacked the fort were led by Baitullah Mehsud, whom the Pakistani government has accused of responsibility for the assassination last month of Benazir Bhutto, the opposition leader and former prime minister.

A last distress radio message was sent to another fort nearby, requesting artillery support as the militants blew up part of the Sararogha fort, broke through the defenses and poured inside, the officials said.

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There is a substantial discrepancy between the Taliban side of the story and that given by Pakistan's official sources. What is clear from both stories is that the fort was over run. The NY Times does not mention violations of the Geneva Conventions by the Taliban in beheading captured soldiers. As usual the paper sees the Conventions as a unilateral contract binding only on our side of any conflict. The Times story does confirm to some extent my earlier speculation that the fort probably received supporting artillery fire from another nearby fort.

Pakistan needs to get better trained troops in the area and needs to get better situational awareness about enemy forces. There is no way a force that size could surprise US or NATO forces in Afghanistan. they would be spotted and destroyed before they could launch an attack. Pakistan has stubbornly refused US help with these miscreants as they call them, but they clearly could use some of our surveillance assets.