AFP : Pakistan clashes halt as tribesmen bury dead

Pakistan clashes halt as tribesmen bury dead

October 10, 2007

IPPI, Pakistan (AFP) — Pakistani troops and militants observed an unofficial ceasefire Wednesday after days of heavy fighting, as thousands of tribesmen buried 50 people killed in airstrikes, officials and witnesses said.

Residents said the dead were civilians including women and children, but the army insisted that it had only killed pro-Taliban militants in Tuesday's attacks on Ippi village in North Waziristan.

At least 250 people, including 47 soldiers, have died in three days of some of the fiercest battles in the rugged region since Pakistan joined the US-led "war on terror" in 2001 after the September 11 attacks.

The area has been identified by US and Pakistani officials as a stronghold of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, which has been blamed for the deadly 9/11 attacks on US soil.

A one-day ceasefire took hold "to allow villagers to bury the dead and take the injured to hospital" after talks with the local administration, said tribal elder and local teacher Hafiz Abdul Wali.

"Around 3,000 tribesmen gathered in Ippi village to offer funeral prayers for some 50 people who died in the air strikes," a local official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Top military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad told AFP there had been no further clashes but added that he had no information about any ceasefire.

"There has been no fighting going on today. It's a status quo," Arshad said.

An AFP reporter who visited the area Wednesday said sudden panic hit the village when residents heard gunship helicopters hovering above.

Residents in Ippi said they were pulling more bodies from the rubble of dozens of homes destroyed in the raids. They said around 12 bombs had landed on the village bazaar.

Thousands of people have already fled from the area.

At the time of the attack the market was full of people from the nearby town of Mir Ali, the second biggest in North Waziristan, where the bazaars had been shut down by the military, witnesses said.

"I was shopping when a bomb hit an overhead electricity transformer and falling power cables killed and injured several people," tribesman Mohammad Nawaz said.

Military spokesman Arshad rejected claims of civilian deaths in the air strikes, saying the rebels were using civilian homes to launch attacks on the security forces.

"The strikes were conducted on militant targets and 50 militants were killed," Arshad told AFP.

The army says around 200 militants have been killed in fighting and air strikes since Sunday.

The village was the ancestral home of an Islamic firebrand tribal leader, the Fakir of Ippi, who fought British colonial forces and then Pakistani troops before his death in 1960.

The use of warplanes against militants who fled into the region after the fall of Afghanistan's Taliban regime six years ago is rare, with the army usually relying on helicopter gunships.

The clashes added to the pressure on President Pervez Musharraf as he awaits a court ruling on the legality of his re-election at the weekend.

They come amid a wave of violence that has swept across Pakistan since government troops besieged and stormed the Al-Qaeda-linked Red Mosque in Islamabad in July, an operation in which around 100 people died.

Around 300 people had died in militant suicide attacks and bomb blasts prior to the clashes in North Waziristan, many of them soldiers.

Pro-Taliban militants are also holding more than 200 Pakistani soldiers in nearby South Waziristan since abducting them in late August.

Musharraf still faces considerable public opposition to using Pakistan's armed forces on their own soil in what many people here regard as a US war.

About 90,000 troops are currently in the region.