Roast them bastards 'till there well done!!
Posted on 03/20/2004 1:16:24 AM PST by Anti-Bubba182
WANA, Pakistan -- Pakistani troops on Saturday resumed their pounding of tribesmen and militants in rural mud fortresses where they believe al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri is trapped. Interrogators began grilling suspects captured in the raid for clues about the terror leader's whereabouts.
The fighting - including thunderous artillery and swooping assaults by Cobra attack helicopters - has forced an exodus of thousands of terrified civilians, who have poured out of the battle zone deep in South Waziristan. Many have taken refuge in Wana, the main town in the tribal zone, but there were indications the battle was following close on their heels.
Loud explosions and gunfire could be heard early Saturday in Gangikhel village, a hamlet of simple mud dwellings just a few miles west of Wana. Previous fighting in Kaloosha, Azam Warsak and Shin Warsak was closer to the border with Afghanistan.
"The operation is on," army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan told The Associated Press Saturday.
Brig. Mahmood Shah, the chief of security for tribal areas in northwestern Pakistan, told AP that some 40 suspects have been arrested in the operation, which began Tuesday, and some of the prisoners have been taken for interrogation to the provincial capital, Peshawar.
Shah said the fierce fighting, heavy fortifications and other intelligence led authorities to believe al-Zawahri might be among the militants. He said authorities had gotten "one or two reports" that the al-Qaida No. 2 had been in the area in the recent past.
An Afghan intelligence official with connections in Pakistan's tribal region also told AP that al-Zawarhi was believed in the area of the Pakistan operation, in South Waziristan.
Osama bin Laden is believed farther north, in North Waziristan, across from the region of the Afghan border city of Khost, the said. There was no firm intelligence on the terror chief's exact location, however.
Security officials said the detainees included Pakistanis, Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks and ethnic Uighurs from China's predominantly Muslim Xinjiang province, where a separatist movement is simmering. No senior al-Qaida leaders were believed to be among them, but authorities hoped they would provide a better picture of the terrorists' heavily fortified lair.
At least 80 ethnic Uzbek Islamic militants, led by Qari Tahir Yaldash, a Taliban ally and deputy of slain Uzbek leader Juma Namangani are reportedly in the Waziristan region. Namangani was killed during the U.S.-led coalition's assault on Afghanistan that began in late 2001.
"Our people are interrogating them to determine who these terrorists are," Shah said. "Some of them are foreigners."
Up to 400 militants are believed holed up in the heavily fortified compounds, Sultan said Friday.
Fighting stopped Friday evening but the troops later began firing artillery guns, an intelligence official in Wana said on condition of anonymity.
Sultan said the Pakistani forces were joined by "a dozen or so" American intelligence agents in the ongoing operation. U.S. satellites, Predator drones and other surveillance equipment hovered overhead.
Sultan put the number of troops killed in the operation at 17, most in a disastrous initial assault on Tuesday. But other military and intelligence officials said many more had died in the heaviest fighting on Thursday and Friday, and about a dozen soldiers were missing and feared taken hostage.
Jawed Ludin, a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said U.S. and Afghan troops captured "semi-senior" terrorist leaders on their side of the border in recent days, though the American military did not confirm that. Ludin declined to give any details of who might be in custody.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld praised Pakistani forces for their work, but said it was not clear whether al-Zawahri was indeed present.
"It's not clear to me who's there, if anybody, but certainly there are an awful lot of fine Pakistani forces working hard," he said Friday in an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live."
Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat told AP that authorities hoped to wrap up the operation by Sunday afternoon, but Shah said the going was slow, with soldiers proceeding cautiously from house to house.
"We are trying to avoid collateral damage to the civilian population. It might take some time," he said.
Residents have denounced the army operation as heavy-handed and against the centuries-old traditions in the semiautonomous tribal region, which has fiercely resisted outside occupation, whether by Afghan rulers, British colonialists or Pakistani army troops.
At the Rehman Medical Complex in Wana, two sisters - Haseena, 10, and Asmeena, 2 - received first aid after being struck by shrapnel. The girls' 12-year-old brother, Din Mohammed, was killed when a shell landed near their house in the village of Kaga Panga.
"We were eating lunch and all of a sudden the shelling began and it hit our courtyard," Haseena said, her face bandaged. "I loved my brother a lot. What did we do to deserve this?"
Under pressure from Washington, Pakistan has sent 70,000 troops into the tribal zone and conducted several raids, though nothing on the scale of this week's operation. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a staunch U.S. ally in its war against terror, pledged Monday to rid his country of foreign extremists.
Sultan said authorities' intelligence assessment was that a high-level fugitive was among the fighters but that he had not been seen and it was unclear whether it was al-Zawahri.
"The type of resistance, the type of preparation of their defensive positions, the hardened fortresses they have made means we can assume that there could probably be some high-value target there," Sultan said Friday from the army press office in Rawalpindi, a city near the capital, Islamabad.
He backed off claims by four senior Pakistani officials that captured militants had revealed that al-Zawahri was among them and possibly wounded.
"So far, whatever people we have apprehended, we have not got confirmation from them," he said, but added that he could not share such intelligence anyway.
The raid began Tuesday as a routine patrol and search for a couple of tribesmen accused of harboring foreign militants, but authorities rushed in reinforcements after paramilitary forces realized they had "barged into a hardened terrorists' den," Sultan said.
He accused the militants of using women and children as human shields in the mud buildings, preventing the troops from using artillery. But he acknowledged that the local "population is on the whole sympathetic" to the fighters.
Sultan said the Pakistani forces had surrounded an area of 20 square miles centered on Shin Warsak, using an inner and outer cordon of troops numbering a "couple of thousand." He said the military was "quite certain that nobody could have escaped."
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Associated Press reporters Paul Haven and Munir Ahmad in Islamabad and Noor Khan in Afghanistan's Paktika province contributed to this report.
Roast them bastards 'till there well done!!
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