By DPA
Islamabad : The Taliban network in Pakistan has announced a unilateral ceasefire with government forces it has been fighting for more than six months.
The ceasefire was announced late Wednesday by a spokesman of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (the Taliban Movement of Pakistan), an umbrella group of more than two dozen pro-Taliban militant groups.
“The military has reduced actions against us, and therefore, we also announce a ceasefire as a goodwill gesture,” Maulvi Omar said in a statement to the media.
“We have said repeatedly that we will fight only those who wage war against us and not those who do not want to fight us,” the statement said.
The spokesman said the truce was for an indefinite period and would cover Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal regions as well as the restive northwest Swat Valley, where government forces are currently flushing out armed Islamic militants who had taken control of the area in October.
Baitullah Mehsud, a Taliban commander from the tribal district of South Waziristan, heads the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. He has been accused by the government and US intelligence officials of masterminding the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto at a Dec 27 election campaign rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.
After her slaying, Army and paramilitary forces backed by helicopter gunships, jet fighters and heavy artillery launched an operation against Mehsud, killing several dozen militants.
The military’s chief spokesman brushed aside the ceasefire declaration, saying cold weather in the mountainous tribal districts likely led to a current lull in fighting.
However, a member of Pakistan’s Senate, Saleh Shah, said that the government of embattled President Pervez Musharraf was holding back-door peace talks with the militants after realizing that a complete military victory was not possible.
Shah, a native of South Waziristan, is the member of a tribal jirga, or council, that is mediating between Mehsud and the government.
The government signed a peace deal with Mehsud in South Waziristan in 2004 and other militant groups in neighbouring North Waziristan in September 2006, but both were scrapped by the militants after Army commandos stormed Islamabad’s Red Mosque July 10 last year to remove hundreds of militants holed up there.
Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz also said that peace talks with militants in the tribal areas were on the cards.
Attacks on security forces, mostly suicide bombings, increased dramatically after the Red Mosque siege, not only in the tribal areas but also across Pakistan, including the capital Islamabad, Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Karachi.
More than 700 people, many of them security personnel, were killed in more than 50 suicide bombings in 2007. Nearly 250 people have also died since New Year’s Day in the bombing campaign.