The overnight attack on Shidano Dand post in the
Kurram Agency...home of an intricately interconnected web of poverty, ignorance, and religious fanaticism, where the laws of cause and effect are assumed to be suspended, conveniently located adjacent to Tora Bora...
triggered festivities in which 18 hard boyz were also killed, a senior military official said.
"Armed hard boyz stormed the post around midnight and killed seven soldiers," said the official, who did not want to be named, adding that the troops retaliated killing 18 thugs.
| Possibly, the two incidents are even related. |
| "Yeah -- they didn't lie at all!" |
"We carried out this attack to avenge the killing of our commander Taj Gul in Khyber agency," Ehsan said, without giving details when he was killed and his significance to the group.
"We have killed 12 FC soldiers and captured four others alive," he said, adding that hard boyz also seized a large cache of weapons.
Independent confirmation of corpse counts is very difficult in the tribal area, a Taliban and Al Qaeda stronghold barred to journalists and aid workers.
The post is located between Kurram and North
Wazoo tribal region on the Afghan border, a zone considered a stronghold of Pak Taliban and Al Qaeda linked thugs.The region has experienced a spike in festivities in recent weeks.
On Tuesday dozens of heavily armed Talibs attacked a Pak military post in the area, sparking festivities that killed eight soldiers and maimed another 15, the military said.
Helicopter gunships were mobilised when the fighting broke out and officials said 35 hard boyz were killed.
Last July, Pakistain launched an offensive to oust religious hard boyz from Kurram, mirroring operations that it has carried out -- with limited success -- across much of the rest of the tribal belt, only for hard boyz to regroup and return.
Pakistain's semi-autonomous tribal belt bordering Afghanistan is rife with a homegrown insurgency, Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked thugs.
On Monday, President Barack Obama
In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died -- an entire town destroyed...
confirmed for the first time that US drones target Taliban and Al Qaeda hard boyz in Pakistain's tribal badlands, a program that has escalated under his administration.
Pakistain, whose relationship with the United States deteriorated in 2011 over the raid that killed the late Osama bin Laden
... who abandoned all hope when he entered there...
and air strikes that killed 24 Pak soldiers, says more than 3,000 troops have died fighting the thugs.