BARA, Pakistan (AFP) — Pakistani forces pushed forward with the new government's first major offensive against Islamist militants Sunday, retaking control of a key town and demolishing an insurgent group's building.
The operation was launched a day earlier in the Khyber tribal agency to counter rebels threatening the northwestern city of Peshawar and attacking supply convoys for US and NATO troops in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Pakistan has come under growing pressure from the United States and other western allies who are concerned about its policy of negotiating with Taliban and other militants in the restive frontier region.
"The situation is under control. There has been no resistance," local administration official Mehmood Afridi told AFP about the operation. Officials said Saturday that one militant was killed.
Security forces had retaken control of Bara, the main town in the region, officials said. Paramilitary troops were patrolling the town in tanks and had set up sand-bag checkpoints, an AFP photographer saw.
Fresh bursts of gunfire could be heard several kilometres (miles) outside Bara but the cause was not immediately clear, the photographer said.
In a village near Bara, the main town in Khyber, soldiers on Sunday blew up a building belonging to a Taliban-linked group, Ansar-ul-Islam, which has been accused of sending fighters into Afghanistan.
"There was no resistance as the building used by Ansar-ul-Islam as their centre was empty," a security official told AFP.
Soldiers were also advancing to other areas in the district including Ansar-ul-Islam's stronghold in the Tirah Valley, officials said.
The troops on Saturday demolished the house and headquarters of the region's top militant warlord, Mangal Bagh, head of the separate Lashkar-e-Islam (LI) group, which officials said was not linked to the Taliban.
Bagh's group has been accused of robbing vehicles on the Khyber Pass, the main supply route for international forces in Afghanistan, although officials said his men were not responsible for cross-border attacks on Western troops.
His hardline followers had however threatened Peshawar, burning CD and barber shops deemed un-Islamic and carrying out several kidnappings, the officials said.
Bagh told a newspaper that he did not know why he was being targeted and said his men had never attacked security forces.
"I have told LI volunteers to go home and not to resist any action," he was quoted as saying by the News, an English language daily.
"The name of our leader has been maligned," Khan Muhammad, a bearded man in his 50s said outside the destroyed LI headquarters, which was reduced to a pile of rubble, an AFP reporter saw.
Meanwhile insurgents struck back in another northwestern region on Sunday, killing two soldiers in a bomb blast and shooting dead four people including a pro-government tribal elder in the troubled Swat Valley, officials said.
Pakistan's government launched peace talks with rebels soon after defeating allies of US-backed President Pervez Musharraf in February elections, saying that his strongarm tactics were worsening violence in the country.
But with the ruling coalition paralysed by divisions over how to handle Musharraf and over the issue of restoring judges sacked by the president last year, the militants have begun to regain ground.
Pakistan's top Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud said Saturday that he was halting two-month-old peace talks with the authorities because of operations against his men.
Mehsud is accused by authorities of orchestrating the assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto in December and recently vowed to keep up attacks on Western troops in Afghanistan.
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