Pakistan troops battle enemy in area hosting Zawahiri

Reuters/Washington Post:

Pakistani security forces killed 30 militants loyal to al Qaeda and Taliban in the latest fighting in a strategically important tribal region on the Afghan border, officials said on Saturday.

Three soldiers, including two army officers, were also killed in the fighting, which began Friday, in Bajaur region described by the military officials as a "center of gravity" for the militants.

The security forces backed by helicopter gunships pounded positions of the militants in and around militant strongholds in Loi Sam and Rashakai areas.

Military spokesman Major Murad Khan said 25 militants were killed in fighting on Friday. A military official said five more insurgents were killed on Saturday.

"The security forces have cleared the areas around west and north of Rashkai and Loi Sam areas," Khan said.

"The security forces are successfully making advances today," he added.

Pakistani security forces launched the offensive in Bajaur in August and a senior military official on Friday estimated 65 percent of the militant problem would be eliminated if guerrillas were defeated in Bajaur.

Major-General Tariq Khan, head of the paramilitary Frontier Corps force, said up to 1,000 militants, including their five senior commanders, and 62 soldiers had been killed in the fighting in the region.

Bajaur is the smallest of Pakistan's seven so-called tribal agencies, semi-autonomous ethnic Pashtun regions along the Afghan border, with a population of just one million people.

But it provides access to surrounding Pakistani regions as well as the eastern Afghan province of Kunar.

Pakistani intelligence officers have said al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al Zawahri was believed to have visited Bajaur in recent years.

In January 2006, a CIA-operated pilotless drone aircraft fired missiles at a house in Bajaur in the belief Zawahri was visiting there. At least 18 villagers were killed.

...

Zawahiri would not visit the area if it were hostile to his objectives. That is why it is so important for Pakistan to assert control over the area. The Pakistan offensive needs to be sustained in order to create the hostile environment needed to drive the Taliban and al Qaeda out and into Afghanistan where our forces can destroy them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more