Pakistani Troops Kill 17 in Border Area

Pakistani troops killed 17 people the military described as foreign militants Sunday, including women and children, in a region bordering Afghanistan.

A Pakistani soldier was also killed in the six-hour clash south of Miran Shah, administrative capital of the North Waziristan tribal region.

The suspected foreign fighters were among dozens killed this week in the unruly border area. On Thursday, U.S. troops based in Afghanistan killed 24 suspected guerrillas as they crossed into North Waziristan after a military post operated by U.S.-led coalition forces came under attack. Four of the dead were from Central Asia and Sudan, and the other 20 were Pushtun tribesmen from North and South Waziristan.

On Sunday, Pakistan’s military said in a statement that four Kazakh passports were found in the compounds where the fighting took place.

“The others are also suspected to be foreigners from the same region,” the statement added. “Diaries and other handwritten notes, presumably in the Kazakh language, have also been recovered.”

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, a spokesman for Pakistan’s armed forces, said troops killed several women and children because they were among the combatants.

“Women were also using weapons and they threw grenades,” he said. Pakistani forces have caught children as young as 12 from Central Asian countries who were planting homemade bombs, Sultan added.

A local source said that two women and two children, including a 6-month-old baby, were among the dead and added that authorities had refused to hand over the bodies for burial.

Troops found arms and ammunition, including detonators, explosives, switches, diagrams and written instructions to make homemade bombs.

The border region is considered a likely hiding place for Osama bin Laden, but senior Afghan and Pakistani officials recently said they didn’t think the Al Qaeda leader was in their territories.

Afghan officials accuse the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency of secretly training Taliban and allied fighters to launch cross-border attacks from bases in the tribal areas. Pakistan has repeatedly denied the charge, but the insurgency continues to escalate despite tens of thousands of troops on both sides of the border.

In Thursday’s attack, a Sudanese man was dressed in a U.S. military uniform, the Dawn newspaper reported, quoting witnesses.

They also said most of the victims were volunteers killed as they carried the bodies of 10 men slain in fighting across the border in Afghanistan.

At a funeral for two of the men Saturday, a local Muslim cleric called them martyrs and declared “our entire Waziristan region is ready for jihad,” or holy war.

Pakistani authorities have banned foreign journalists from North and South Waziristan, and accounts of the situation there come mainly from official military statements.

In late May, the commander of Pakistani troops in South Waziristan said he had removed all foreign fighters from the region. There were up to 600 militants in South Waziristan last year, Maj. Gen. Niaz Khattak said at the time.

In a series of battles over several months, 306 militants with suspected links to Al Qaeda, and their local supporters, were killed.

The fighting left 250 Pakistani troops dead, Khattak said.

In declaring victory over militants in South Waziristan, Khattak said in May that there were fewer than 100 fighters in small groups left in North Waziristan.

On Sunday, Sultan declined to estimate how many remained in the region.

Sunday’s fighting erupted when security forces cordoned off an area south of Miran Shah after receiving a tip that foreign militants were holed up in what the military called “a few isolated compounds.”

Troops who searched the compound with local officials “found a lot of material used in terrorist activities,” the military’s statement said. During the search, militants in two vehicles tried to break through the cordon, it added.

Soldiers “knocked out one vehicle, and the second vehicle stopped,” the military said. Local officials and tribal elders tried for two to three hours to persuade the people in the car, which included a few women, to surrender, the military said.

“They were again challenged by the troops,” the statement said. “The militants and women fired back and lobbed grenades” that killed one soldier.

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Special correspondent Zulfiqar Ali in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.