Islamabad, March 31: – Five soldiers and 20 Islamist insurgents were killed Wednesday in clashes in Pakistan’s tribal region near the Afghan border, a security official said.
The fighting started in the Bara area of the Khyber tribal district when a group of militants attacked a base of the paramilitary Frontier Corps with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles.
“The clashes continued for around six hours, and our five men were martyred while around 30 were injured,” a senior corps official said.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the wounded were evacuated to a hospital in the nearby city of Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province.
Twenty Islamist rebels died as the security forces repulsed the attack and later targeted several of the militants’ positions with artillery fire, the official said.
Government forces have been carrying out an offensive in the past seven months to eliminate militant hideouts in the rugged Khyber district, which is home to the main supply route for Western forces stationed in landlocked Afghanistan.
Trucks transporting fuel and other crucial supplies for the NATO-led forces come under regular attack by Taliban guerrillas there.
The militant raid came a day after Pakistani jet fighters pounded Taliban hideouts set up in a state-run school, health centre and a commercial market in the neighbouring Orakzai tribal district, the Dawn newspaper reported.
Twenty insurgents were killed and 10 more wounded in the airstrikes while two civilians also died, Dawn cited unnamed security officials as saying.
The air raids were part of a major army assault launched a week ago in Orakzai against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters fleeing military action in South Waziristan.
According to government data, the weeklong fighting has killed more than 150 militants and five soldiers.
Tens of thousands of people are fleeing the clashes in Orakzai amid warnings from local officials of a looming humanitarian crisis.
“About 46,000 families have been registered over the last three months, and people are still fleeing their homes and coming to relief camps,” Shazia Khattak, a government official in the adjacent district of Hangu, told Dawn.
Washington terms Pakistan’s tribal region as the most dangerous place in the world and a hub of global terrorism. Islamist militants in the area have aided the nearly nine-year Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
US President Barack Obama’s administration, which has put a focus on Pakistan’s tribal region in its revised policy aimed at quelling the Taliban uprising in Afghanistan, has praised Pakistan’s recent efforts against militants near the Afghan border.
–Agencies