By DPA,
Islamabad : Six soldiers and 25 Islamist insurgents were killed Wednesday in clashes in Pakistan\’s tribal region near the Afghan border, a security official said.
The fighting started in the Bara area of the Khyber tribal district when 50 to 60 militants attacked a security post with rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles and suicide car bombs.
A statement from the paramilitary Frontier Corps said the troops destroyed several suicide car bombs during the clashes, which lasted for hours. At least six soldiers were killed and 15 injured in the attack.
Twenty-five Islamist rebels also died as the security forces repulsed the attack and later targeted several of the militants’ positions with artillery fire, the corps said.
The figures could not be independently verified because the area remains inaccessible for reporters.
Government forces have been carrying out an offensive in the past seven months to eliminate militant hideouts in the rugged Khyber district, which is home to the main supply route for Western forces stationed in landlocked Afghanistan.
Trucks transporting fuel and other crucial supplies for the NATO-led forces there come under regular attack by Taliban guerrillas.
The militant raid came a day after Pakistani jet fighters pounded Taliban hideouts set up in a state-run school, health centre and a commercial market in the neighbouring Orakzai tribal district, the Dawn newspaper reported.
Twenty insurgents were killed and 10 more wounded in the air strikes while two civilians also died, Dawn cited unnamed security officials as saying.
The air raids were part of a major army assault launched a week ago in Orakzai against Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters fleeing military action in South Waziristan.
According to government data, the week-long fighting has killed more than 150 militants and five soldiers.
Tens of thousands of people are fleeing the clashes in Orakzai amid warnings from local officials of a looming humanitarian crisis.
“About 46,000 families have been registered over the last three months, and people are still fleeing their homes and coming to relief camps,” Shazia Khattak, a government official in the adjacent district of Hangu, told Dawn.
Washington terms Pakistan’s tribal region as the most dangerous place in the world and a hub of global terrorism. Islamist militants in the area have aided the nearly nine-year Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
US President Barack Obama’s administration, which has put a focus on Pakistan’s tribal region in its revised policy aimed at quelling the Taliban uprising in Afghanistan, has praised Pakistan’s recent efforts against militants near the Afghan border.
The US itself has intensified attacks on Taliban and Al Qaeda dens with unmanned drone aircraft.
On Wednesday, two drones fired three missiles at a mud compound in North Waziristan, killing six people, said a local intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The identities of those who died were not known.