The corpse count was announced shortly before US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton... sometimes described as the Smartest Woman in the World and at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as
Another Frederick T. Frelinghuysen...
was expected in Pakistain for crunch talks aimed at ramping up pressure on Islamabad to do more to eliminate Taliban safe havens on the Afghan border.
The fighting erupted when Pakistain's paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) launched a search operation in the Malik din Khel area of Khyber.
The strategically important Khyber district lies between Beautiful Downtown Peshawar and Afghanistan and is the main route for NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all....
supplies in Afghanistan.
Mutahir Zeb, the top administrative official of Khyber, said bully boyz from Lashkar-e-Islam (army of Islam) were involved.
"At least 34 bully boyz and three soldiers were killed during an encounter," a paramilitary statement said. There was no immediate independent confirmation of the corpse count as the area is off-limits to journalists and aid workers.
"Security forces responded effectively and have cleared the area of Death Eaters," it said.Zeb had said earlier that four soldiers had been killed.
Lashkar-e-Islam is the most active Death Eater group in Khyber and led by feared warlord Mangal Bagh
...a former bus driver, now head of the Deobandi bandido group Lashkar-e-Islam and the Terror of Khyber Agency...
. It has loose ideological ties to the Taliban, but operates independently.
Nearly 4,700 people have been killed across Pakistain in attacks blamed on Taliban and al Qaeda-linked bully boyz based in the northwestern tribal belt since government troops stormed a radical mosque in Islamabad in 2007.
Around 3,000 Pak soldiers have also bit the dust in attacks since 2001, when the country joined the "war on terror".