'The government has launched a full-fledged operation in the tribal areas including Waziristan,' Owais Ahmad Ghani told a press conference in Islamabad. -- PHOTO: REUTERS
ISLAMABAD - PAKISTANI security forces have launched a 'full-fledged' assault on the Taleban's top chief in the country and his rebels in the lawless tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, an official said on Sunday.
Missile strike kills 3
Also Sunday, a suspected missile strike by a US drone aircraft targeting Islamist extremists killed at least three people in South Waziristan.
'A drone attack targeting a militant vehicle killed three people in Mardar Algad area,' said Amir Mohammad Khan, a local administration official.
ISLAMABAD - PAKISTAN'S foreign minister has called for more international aid to combat Islamic extremists, saying in an interview published Monday that the Taleban could otherwise move into India and the Gulf.
The warning from Shah Mehmood Qureshi, in an interview with the Financial Times, comes two days before the first summit of European Union and Pakistan leaders in Brussels, at which aid for Islamabad will likely top the agenda.
The announcement of operations in the semi-autonomous north-west zone comes shortly after a bomb killed eight people near the area, the latest in a series of blasts the government has blamed on most-wanted militant Baitullah Mehsud.
Security forces are already locked in a seven-week campaign against the insurgents in three other north-west districts, and a recent wave of deadly attacks are widely seen as Taleban retribution for the fierce offensive.
'The government has launched a full-fledged operation in the tribal areas including Waziristan,' Owais Ahmad Ghani, governor of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), told a press conference in Islamabad.
'Operations will continue until the elimination of the militants.' Pakistan's military had already said it had bombed militant hideouts in South Waziristan, but Mr Ghani's announcement is the first official confirmation of the opening up of a second front. In its daily briefing on Sunday, the military confirmed that 30 suspected militants were killed in strikes in South Waziristan a day earlier.
The rugged tribal region is a stronghold of Mehsud, head of umbrella Taleban group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and Washington alleges that Al-Qaeda and Taleban extremists are in Waziristan plotting attacks on Western targets. 'We have ordered all the law enforcing agencies to start a full-fledged operation against Baitullah Mehsud and his followers,' said Mr Ghani.
'These are the people who are responsible for all of the bombing, terrorism, (and) killing of innocent people.' A spokesman for Mehsud has claimed that TTP were behind a string of deadly attacks on civilians in Pakistan in recent weeks.
In the latest attack, militants remotely detonated explosives hidden in a rickshaw at a busy Sunday market in Dera Ismail Khan town, with eight people killed and dozens injured, police and hospital officials said.
Dera Ismail Khan is about 300km south of the provincial capital Peshawar, where a commando-style suicide gun and bomb attack killed nine people at the luxury Pearl Continental hotel on Tuesday. -- AFP
