Pakistan says militants exploiting flood chaos

Islamic militants are exploiting the strain this summer’s monsoon floods placed on the military and government by regrouping their forces in northwest Pakistan, provincial officials warned Thursday.

Sen. John Kerry, who is in Islamabad, also expressed concern about a strengthening insurgency as he announced that the United States would ramp up its flood relief package to $150 million.

As the crisis nears its fourth week, officials in Islamabad and Washington are increasingly worried that Taliban militants and other Islamic extremist groups will take advantage of a disaster that has forced 60,000 Pakistani troops into flood relief work and diverted police resources across the country.

Those concerns are heightened by the fact that some of the areas that suffered the most from record-breaking monsoons are in the country’s northwest and in southern Punjab, regions where Islamic militancy is entrenched and preys upon poverty-stricken populations.

Pakistani officials say it could take years to rebuild the housing, bridges, roads, hospitals and schools ravaged by the flooding, creating an ideal environment for economic stagnation, social unrest and a rise in militancy. To head off those conditions, Pakistani and U.S. leaders have urged the international community to dramatically step up flood assistance.

“None of us want to see this crisis provide an opportunity or excuse for people who want to exploit the misfortunes of others for political or ideological purposes,” Kerry said at a news conference with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

Zardari echoed Kerry’s concern, saying the crisis could open the door for recruitment and development of militants.

“Taking babies who have become orphans, putting them in their own camps to train them as the terrorists of tomorrow — things like that is what I’m worried about, what I’m sending an SOS on,” Zardari said.

In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, formerly North-West Frontier Province and home to the tribal belt that Taliban leaders use as their power base, officials said they were seeing the first signs of that exploitation taking place.

Provincial Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said militant groups had begun showing increased aggressive behavior outside the province’s volatile capital, Peshawar, and urged the federal government to launch a crackdown on the groups.

On Tuesday, 200 militants from Khyber — one of the tribal districts used by Taliban militants as a sanctuary — converged on Peshawar and clashed with police. Several militants were killed, but no police officers died or were injured in the clashes, officials said. Also Tuesday, militants entered a mosque in a Peshawar suburb and shot and killed two tribal elders involved in a local anti-Taliban militia.

“A resurgence of militancy in the region can become a serious threat for the country as well as for the world, if the [provincial] government does not get immediate help,” Hussain said at a news conference. “It will be very difficult for us to fight alone against the militants and cope with the natural disaster simultaneously.”

The floods, the worst Pakistan has ever seen, have killed more than 1,600 people and destroyed 900,000 houses in a swath of ruin that cuts through the country’s mountainous north; Punjab province, its agricultural heartland; and Sindh province, on the Arabian Sea.

On Thursday, U.N. officials revised their estimates of the number of homeless from 2 million to 4.6 million. The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that 3.5 million children in flood-stricken areas are at risk of contracting potentially fatal diseases such as cholera, malaria and dengue fever through contaminated water and insects.

The international community, which has been slow to respond, has begun to increase the pace of donations, U.N. officials said. The United Nations appealed Aug. 11 for $460 million, and $272 million has been pledged or donated. The U.N. has said billions of dollars in additional assistance will be needed to rebuild infrastructure.

The United States already has sent $87 million in flood relief to Pakistan. The aid has included daily military helicopter rescue and relief missions in northwest Pakistan’s Swat Valley, pre-fabricated temporary steel bridges, more than 515,000 pounds of food and other relief goods, as well as $30 million distributed directly to non-governmental organizations assisting in the relief effort.

In announcing the additional U.S. aid, Kerry emphasized the massive scale of the disaster and the need to ensure that it did not undermine the stability of a country struggling to lift millions of people out of poverty.

alex.rodriguez@latimes.com

Special correspondents Zulfiqar Ali in Peshawar and Nasir Khan in Islamabad contributed to this report.