Pakistan has driven out al Qaeda and the Taliban from one of their main nerve centres near the Afghan border, where it has been fighting militants for nearly two years, a top commander said on Tuesday. Pakistan’s military took reporters to the former militant bastion of Damadola located in Bajaur Agency in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Afghan border, where al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri was in recent years believed to have been hiding.
By **Iftikhar A. Khan **
Wednesday, 03 Mar, 2010
DAMADOLA: Security forces have taken control of Bajaur’s Damadola, known as the nerve-centre of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, and are now bracing themselves for an offensive in Orakzai Agency and Tirah valley of Khyber Agency.
“We are facing problems in Orakzai and Tirah and will launch operations there in the near future,” Frontier Corps Inspector General Maj-Gen Tariq Khan told a media team from Islamabad here on Tuesday. The ISPR’s director general, Maj-Gen Athar Abbas, was also present.
The capture of Damadola, near the Afghan border, has boosted the morale of troops and the military leadership is now contemplating an all-out offensive in other agencies where militants are strengthening their positions.
With the success in Damadola, once a no-go area and thought to be insurmountable, the entire Bajaur agency stands cleared of militants.
The most significant feature of the episode was the capture of a key Taliban complex in Damadola, the stronghold of TTP leader Maulvi Faqir Mohammad. The complex had a number of caves used by militants as hideouts and ammunition dumps.
A large quantity of explosives, weapons and currency notes were found in the caves. The complex faces ice-capped mountains straddling Pakistan’s border with eastern Afghanistan.
**
FLAG FLIES HIGH: **
Maj-Gen Tariq said the Pakistan flag had been raised in the region for the first time since independence.
Damadola has served as the main route for cross-border activities of militants. The area came into the limelight after the first US drone attack that killed 18 people in 2006. The strike was aimed at Ayman al Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s No 2.
The Frontier Corps IG said that about 75 militants, including foreigners, had been killed in the offensive. “Among the dead were Egyptians, Uzbeks, Chechens and Afghans.”
He said there were over 150 caves dug into the mountains over a period of five to seven years.
Maj-Gen Tariq stressed Damadola’s strategic importance as a link to Afghanistan, Chitral, Swat and the main highway to China.
He said the entire Bajaur agency and adjoining areas were controlled from Damadola and Maulvi Faqir was receiving help from the Wali of Kunar province in Afghanistan.
He said the area, which had been turned into safe havens for militants, was cleared up to the Afghan border. “Now the Taliban leadership does not exist. Twenty-five per cent of them have fled to Afghanistan and 15 per cent to Swat and other areas. Others have either been killed or captured,” he said. In reply to a question about the destruction of the house of Jamaat-i-Islami leader Haroonur Rasheed in Damadola, Maj-Gen Tariq said there was no doubt that the house was ‘the terrorists’ headquarter’.
He said documents found in the house, including minutes of a meeting of the TTP held in Makeen and a list of participants with signatures, were a clear proof against Mr Rasheed.
Maj-Gen Tariq said the house had been blown up under an FCR law, adding that Mr Rasheed was an absconder and would be tried under the law when arrested.
People in Damadola told Dawn that militants had made their lives miserable before the military offensive and had “subjected us to the worst kind of atrocities”.
Haji Malik Sher Ali Jan, a leader of the local lashkar, urged the government to arrange a special electricity line for the region because the entire electricity system had been disabled after the operation.
Reconstruction of roads, provision of drinking water and rehabilitation of health and education facilities were badly needed, Malik Sher Jan added.
Journalists were later taken to Bajaur, where locals were reported to have raised a 10,000-strong lashkar. About 2,000 armed men were seen guns, dancing and chanting slogans in favour of Pakistan. Most of them belonged to the Mamond tribe. Business activities have remained suspended in Khar, the main town in Bajaur, for the past one month.
“We have concluded operations up to the Afghan border. We think the Bajaur operations have now more or less ended as dedicated military operations,” Maj-Gen Tariq said.
The village of Damadola has been largely destroyed in the fighting.
In 2008, the Army mounted an offensive in Bajaur and later said it had largely cleared militants from the area, but clashes erupted again in recent months.
In Khar, hundreds of members of the lashkar held a show of force in support of the military in a battle-scarred market. Many people stood on the roof of a pock-marked shell of a building, looking on as militiamen banged drums, danced with their assault rifles held aloft and chanting “Long Live Pakistan”.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/04-army-bajaur-qs-10
