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therussianissues.com
General Musharraf's soldiers fight Chechens from Al-Qaeda
by Vladimir Dunayev
28.06.2002, 13:38
[printable version]
Two remarkable events occurred yesterday in the history of the Pakistani army. Government troops suffered their first casualties in the fight against international terrorism (10 soldiers were killed). Besides that, the Pakistani forces encountered for the first time "a non-traditional" enemy - Chechen warriors. A pitched battle between the Pakistani soldiers and Chechens - members of the Al-Qaeda terrorist group - flared up in the Pashtun region of Southern Vaziristan - an area where the government practically does not control the situation. Thousands of soldiers from the regular army are being dispatched to the zone of hostilities. This marks the beginning of a large-scale military operation.
The army is pulling up armor and artillery to Southern Vaziristan. Helicopter gun-ships are providing air support. According to intelligence reports, the Pakistani forces face approximately 50 Chechens that had been fighting on the side of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and then had fled to neighboring Pakistan.
The first battle did not end in favor of General Musharraf's forces that lost 10 men, having killed only two terrorists. The soldiers captured a 15-year-old youth, but the generals are not divulging his nationality. Since springtime, the Chechen warriors and their families lived in the house of a village elder from one of the local Pashtun tribes. This information was procured by American special services that informed Islamabad about that.
According to Izvestia sources, talks were held for several days with the Chechens in the hope that they would surrender voluntarily. But the negotiations were suddenly disrupted and fighting broke out. The Chechens fled into the mountains, leaving two warriors to cover them up. When Pakistani troops stormed the house, the terrorists blew themselves up together with the attacking Pakistanis.
According to a Pentagon spokesman, the Pakistanis asked their colleagues from the United States for help. "We are allies," the Americans declared, but they offered no assistance. True, inhabitants from adjacent villages say they saw "foreign soldiers" not far from the battle zone.
According to American intelligence reports, there are approximately a thousand Taliban and Al-Qaeda warriors in hiding in Pakistan. Primarily, they are the remnants of the armies of Osama bin Laden and mullah Omar. The Chechen, Taliban and Arab terrorists managed to escape from Tora-Tora and adjacent settlements where the American Special Forces failed to wipe out all the terrorists. And now they are hiding in Pakistan.
"The Pakistani Pashtuns allowed the Chechens and Arabs into their habitat not because they sympathize with bin Laden or because of their dislike of America: the main law in the mountains is the law of hospitality," the RIA Novosti correspondent in Islamabad, Vladimir Preter, told Izvestia. "In Pakistan, they say a Pashtun cannot be conquered but that he can be bought."
Two months ago, General Musharraf, in exchange for promises to give financial aid to Pashtun areas, received the go-ahead from the village elders to dispatch his troops to Pashtunistan. It is noteworthy that during the past 54 years there has never been a soldier or a policeman in those mountains - everything was controlled by the so-called local home guard. And now while the soldiers are hunting down bin Laden's supporters, builders are constructing homes, schools and bridges for the Pashtuns.
In so doing, the government hopes that in the fighting against Al-Qaeda warriors, the Pashtuns will not stab the Pakistani army in the back. |
