Pakistan "turns corner" in offensive, commander

By Robert Birsel

LOISAM, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani forces have turned the corner in the country's main front in its war against militancy with the capture of a strategically important village after heavy fighting, the commander of the operation said on Saturday.

The major-general in charge of the offensive in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border said his men were estimated to have killed more than 1,500 militants since August while 73 soldiers had been killed.

There has been no independent verification of the military's casualty estimate but soldiers on the front said fighting had been fierce with well-organized and well-supplied militants battling hard from networks of tunnels and fortified compounds.

The army has pushed militants off a road running west from the region's main town of Khar, with villages along the road suffering heavy damage. Villagers fled before the fighting.

Militants remained a few kilometers either side of the road and were exchanging intermittent fire with security forces on Saturday when the military took a group of reporters to the destroyed village of Loisam captured in the past few days.

"The worst is over I think things from here onward will be much easier. In my personal feeling, I think we've turned the corner," said Major-General Tariq Khan, commander of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, who is in charge of the offensive.

Bajaur is one of seven semi-autonomous ethnic Pashtun regions in northwest Pakistan, known as tribal agencies, where al Qaeda and Taliban have been expanding their influence in recent years.

The United States, facing a surge in Taliban violence in Afghanistan, has been pressing Pakistan to eliminate militant havens in the agencies.

U.S. forces have carried out about a dozen missile strikes and a commando raid in North and South Wazirisan, to the southeast of Bajaur, in recent weeks.

FOREIGN MILITANTS

Khan described Bajaur as the militants' center of gravity, a mountainous region giving the insurgents easy access to other Pakistani tribal agencies and to Afghanistan.

The militants had made extensive preparations to defend it, he said. "No other agency has been prepared for a battle like this," Khan told reporters in Khar.

Khan said 300 foreigners had been captured in the fighting including Uzbeks, Tajiks and Afghans.

Loisam is on a cross-roads and controls access to three of four valleys in the area. Its capture would disrupt militant communications and infiltration routes, he said.

The village was almost completely destroyed. Concrete shops in its center were reduced to broken slabs of rubble.