Soldiers backed by armoured vehicles retook control of the main town in the Khyber tribal district, on the outskirts of Peshawar, and also demolished a building belonging to an Islamist insurgent group, officials said.
    The government, under pressure from Western allies over its peace talks with militants, launched the operation on Saturday to counter rebels threatening Peshawar and raiding supply convoys for Nato and US troops in Afghanistan.
    “The government has been successful in the operation in Khyber which was carried out to safeguard Peshawar,” interior ministry chief Rehman Malik told a high-level meeting in Peshawar. “Peshawar is totally safe. People should take a sound sleep, because their government is awake,” Malik said, although he did not say when the operation would finish.
    Troops had found several “torture cells” and private jails, senior tribal areas official Habibullah said. An illegal FM radio station used for spreading “hate speech” was also destroyed, Malik added.
    Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani separately denied the government had launched the operation because of pressure from Washington, adding that he had told US President George Bush that talks with militants would continue.
    “This is our war and it is for our own survival,” Gilani told reporters after a meeting of slain former premier Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party in Lahore.
    “Nobody will be allowed to execute others publicly, kidnap minorities, set fire to girls’ schools and barber shops in Pakistan,” said Gilani. AFP

Villagers fly flags in support of militant


Bara: Black flags with a sword emblazoned across them were flying above many of the mud-walled homes in the Pakistani town of Bara on Sunday in a show of support for a militant who government forces are out to get.
    The flags were those of the Lashkar-i-Islami, or Army of Islam in northwest Pakistan’s Khyber region. Government forces launched an offensive on Saturday to push members of the militant group, led by a commander called Mangal Bagh, from the approaches of Peshawar after Bagh’s men began making forages into the city to impose their Taliban-style ways.
    Though he is feared by many in Peshawar, in Bara, a town southwest of Peshawar, the thin commander is well regarded. “He’s nice man. He’s being painted as a bad man because he talks about Islam,” said Fazal-e-Mehboob standing by the debris of Bagh’s house that troops blew up on Saturday. <<back