Islamabad: Security forces fighting their way through a mountainous Taliban stronghold killed at least seven terrorists and injured several more, officials said, while Pakistan's foreign minister said the offensive in tribal South Waziristan should finish sooner than originally expected.
As part of the government's ramping up of its fight against the terrorists, it will offer bounties of up to five crore rupees ($600,000) for each of the top three Taliban leaders, according to an official advertisement to be published on Monday in Pakistani newspapers and obtained by The Associated Press.
But the recent successes of the campaign in South Waziristan, and the optimism of Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi that it would soon achieve its objectives, were offset by a string of anti-government attacks in other tribal regions, where terrorists kidnapped and killed a prominent pro-government activist and blew up a girls' school.
The kidnapping occurred on Saturday night in the town of Khar, the largest in the Bajur tribal region, when a group of about 60 terrorists stormed the house of Jahangir Khan, said Adalat Khan, a town official.
The same terrorists also kidnapped one of the town's wealthiest landlords along with his son, his grandson and another relative. It was not immediately clear why they were kidnapped, though abductions for ransom have become increasingly common.
Terrorists also blew up a girls' school in the Khyber tribal region, the latest in the Taliban's campaign against modern education that has destroyed hundreds of schools across Pakistan, said local official Ghulam Farooq Khan. The school's guard and three of his relatives were injured in the Sunday attack in the town of Bara, near where seven Pakistani paramilitary soldiers were killed in a Saturday roadside bombing.
Despite such problems, Qureshi insisted things were going well in the its two-week-old offensive in South Waziristan, one of the semiautonomous tribal regions where the Taliban has grown in power in recent years.
"The operation so far has been very successful. The resistance that we were expecting initially did not come with the same swiftness we were expecting," the foreign minister told reporters in Kuala Lumpur, where he was to attend a meeting of Muslim countries starting on Monday.
The Sunday fighting, meanwhile, took place in Kaniguram, a Taliban stronghold where government forces are still fighting for control of about half of the village.
A total of nine terrorists have been killed in South Waziristan over the past 24 hours, according to an army statement. Officials said seven of those were killed on Sunday. Two soldiers have also been killed.
The officials, from Pakistan's intelligence branches and the paramilitary Frontier Corps, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak with the media.
While Pakistan aided the rise of the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s, the growth of a terrorist Taliban network on its own soil has increasingly destabilised the country.
On Monday, the government plans to advertise bounties for the group's leaders. The highest bounties will be offered for help in the capture, dead or alive, of Hakimullah Mehsud, the chief of Pakistani Taliban, Waliur Rehman, the South Waziristan commander, and Qari Hussain Mehsud, believed to be the main trainer of suicide bombers. Lesser bounties were offered for 16 other Taliban officials.
"Such people are killers of humanity, and they deserve an exemplary punishment," the advertisement states. "The brutal acts of these people are earning a bad name for the Muslims in Pakistan and around the world."
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