[Onthebarricades] PAKISTAN: Government pays price for Lal Masjid in border regions

[Andy]

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15/7/2007 1:25:29 PM 
( Source: Reuters) 




Violence surges in Pakistan, 25 dead 


By Zeeshan Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Twenty-five people were killed in northwest Pakistan on Sunday in a surge of militant violence which officials said could be aimed at avenging the commando assault on a radical mosque in the capital last week.

Also on Sunday, pro-Taliban militants in the North Waziristan region on the Afghan border called off a 10-month peace deal with the government after accusing authorities of violating the pact.

More than 80 people, most of them paramilitary soldiers and police, have been killed in attacks in the northwest since July 3, when security forces in Islamabad surrounded the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, complex following clashes with gunmen.

Commandos stormed the fortified mosque-school compound a week later killing 75 supporters of hardline clerics, most of them militant gunmen.

Fourteen people, 11 of them paramilitary soldiers, were killed in a suicide-bomb ambush on a patrol in the scenic Swat valley in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) early on Sunday.

Hours later, a suicide bomber targeted a police recruiting centre in the city of Dera Ismail Khan, in the same province, killing 14, most of them young men taking a police entrance exam, officials said.

"The attacks in Swat and D.I. Khan could be linked to the Lal Masjid," Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Sherpao told Geo TV.

"It's very difficult to stop suicide attacks."

In the Swat valley attack, two suicide bombers rammed cars into a security force convoy as a roadside bomb went off, killing 11 soldiers and three civilians, said military spokesman Major-General Waheed Arshad. About 30 soldiers were wounded.

"Blood is splattered all over the road. A paramilitary vehicle is totally gutted," Pakistani reporter Moosa Khan said by telephone from the scene.

Twenty-four paramilitary soldiers were killed in a suicide car bomb attack in North Waziristan on Saturday, in the most serious single attack on security forces since November.

BACKLASH

Security analysts had expressed fears of a militant backlash over the Lal Masjid assault.

The government said 75 people, at least 60 of them militants, were killed in the complex where militants accumulated an arsenal of weapons and where a hardline cleric defied government orders to surrender.

Many of the militants, who turned the complex into a virtual fortress, and many of the religious students who studied there, were believed to have been from the NWFP.

Pakistan's rugged northwest is a hotbed of al Qaeda and Taliban support, U.S. military officers in Afghanistan say.

The collapse of the North Waziristan peace deal did not appear to be linked to the Lal Masjid assault but is likely to add to the problems security forces are facing.

Under the pact, authorities agreed to stop military operations against the militants in return for their pledge that they would not send fighters across the border into Afghanistan and would not launch attacks on security forces.

While U.S. military officials in Afghanistan said the pact had not stopped insurgent raids into Afghanistan, it did lead to a sharp fall in attacks on Pakistani forces in North Waziristan.

A militant leadership council said it was abandoning the pact because security forces had launched several attacks on them and the government had deployed more troops in the region.
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