At least three dozen soldiers were killed and scores injured when hundreds of Taliban insurgents holed up in Afghanistan launched a pre-dawn cross-border raid on Pakistani checkpoints in the country's northwestern Chitral district on Saturday. This was the latest in a series of attacks that militants have carried inside Pakistan from their bases in Afghanistan's Nuristan and Kunar provinces bordering Chitral.
The cross-border raids have raised tension between the two countries. A Pakistan military statement said terrorists have organized themselves in Kunar and Nuristan with the support of local Afghan authorities. It said Pakistan Taliban commanders Fazullah and Faqir Mohammad-led insurgents from Swat, Dir and Bajur had attacked the security posts. The two are among many Pakistani Taliban fighters who fled to Afghanistan in the face of army offensives and joined allies there to regroup and threaten Pakistani border regions.
Afghan security forces had claimed to have killed Fazlullah alias mullah radio in a clash at Barg Mittal in Nuristan last year. Fazlullah had escaped a Pakistan military operation in Swat a year earlier that inflicted heavy losses on Taliban and drove them out of the scenic valley.
Local Taliban insurgents and former Afghan PM Gulbuddin Hikmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami militia have re-established their bases in the two provinces since the United States pulled out its troops from eastern Afghanistan and offered sanctuaries to their Pakistani allies.Officials said civilian settlements were also attacked along with the paramilitary posts in Chitral. "Twenty-six soldiers and 10 border police were killed. About a dozen militants were also killed in retaliatory attacks," said Col Haroon Rasheed, commandant of a local paramilitary unit. He said the militants attacked some posts with heavy weapons while others with mortar bombs. There was no independent verification of the toll.
An official said clashes between the security forces and militants were still on in the area. Pakistani troops also blew up three bridges in the region to halt militant incursion. Around 60 Pakistani soldiers were killed in clashes when some 600 militants from Afghanistan attacked two Pakistani villages in the upper Dir region in July. Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.
Pakistani militants have largely relied on a campaign of suicide and bomb attacks but carrying out large-scale attacks on government and army targets seems to be their new strategy. Kabul and Washington have long blamed Pakistan for not doing enough to stop militant infiltration into Afghanistan. Now Islamabad is urging Afghanistan and the US to stem flow of militants into its border areas.
In a separate incident, gunmen kidnapped and killed a retired army colonel in the northwestern garrison city of Kohat. Col Shakeel Ahmad was abducted when he was on his way home after morning prayers. Police intercepted the gunmen in a car at a checkpoint and engaged them in a gunfight in which one police officer was killed. The abductors escaped and later shot dead Col Ahmad and threw his body.
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