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Local population still being held hostage
Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan, Director-General, Inter Services Public Relations, said at a media briefing on Wana at the GHQ that a 'couple of thousand' Pakistani troops were engaged in Wana and had cordoned off an area of 50 square kilometres.
| The cordon zone keeps growing. First it was 15-20, then 20, and now 50. |
Explaining the high casualties suffered by Pakistani paramilitary forces, the spokesman said the Frontier Constabulary underestimated the level of resistance and "barged into the den of hardened terrorists on March 16". He said when the Frontier Constabulary started the search operation, it came under fire from trained terrorists. These hardened terrorists used the local population as human shield, and the Pakistani forces, in order to keep the collateral damage to the minimum, applied maximum restraint.
| That may explain why they've been so eager to negotiate here. Usual caveats about Pakistani duplicity aside, if they're holding anywhere near the 250 hostages that have been attributed to them it's gonna be bad news if the troops go in shooting. Isn't holding the whole town hostage originally a tactic from the first Chechen war? |
In the area of Razmak, four people were apprehended on Friday. Of them, one is an Arab and the remaining are possibly locals. A huge cache of weapons had been recovered from them, he said. He said the local people in Wana were sympathetic to these terrorists, and the government was trying to make them realize that the environment had changed. "If they want to live in the past, the government is left with no option but to use force and flush out the terrorists."
Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-03-20 |
