Pakistan lifts veil on Waziristan war

SPINKAI RAGHZAI- The hospital was used for assembling bombs and suicide jackets.
The government school in Spinkai Raghzai was used to train young boys to blow themselves up.
There was another class for suicide bombers in Kotkai, a village 20 minutes down a road winding through the Mehsud tribal lands of Pakistan's South Waziristan.
'This is one area where they were training very, very young boys aged between 9 to 13 years,' said Pakistan Army Brigadier Ali Abbas, in a briefing given on a hilltop overlooking Spinkai Raghzai with Kotkai just visible in the distance.
People of villages like these were made to pay for letting militants loyal to Baitullah Mehsud take over their community.
The army ordered them to quit their homes and move to makeshift camps elsewhere, before launching an offensive in January to drive out fighters led by the barely educated former truck driver who late last year named himself leader of the Pakistani Taliban and declared war on the government.
Retreat to the next ridgeline
Out of an estimated 450,000 people living in Mehsud territory some 200,000 are now lodged in camps.
When the tribespeople go back, they'll find crops withering, livestock starving, and villages that need partial rebuilding after the destruction caused mostly by punitive army action.
In Spinkai Raghzai, the army bulldozed the bazaar. It is now literally a road of destruction, but people's houses were untouched except for a couple where arms caches were found.
The army took a small group of journalists in mid-May to the area that saw the fiercest fighting during Operation Zalzala, the Urdu word for Earthquake.
'The Mehsuds are very fierce fighters, their young men are very bold,' said Brigadier Abbas. 'They are the toughest tribe.'
Using helicopter gunships to drive Taliban fighters from positions on the ridges, and three tanks that trundled up the wide, stony, almost dry river bed, the army's 30-km (18-mile) thrust in January cleared the area from Jandola to Kotkai.
The enemy had nearly 600 fighters, armed with assault rifles, anti-aircraft guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Only a handful of the hostile fighters were caught, and 25 to 30 killed in the four days of fighting.
The rest melted away over the next ridgeline, protecting the road to Baitullah Mehsud's lairs in Makeen and Ladda.
They left behind truckloads of arms and ammunition, and bomb factories, stacked with tonnes of explosives and thousands of ball bearings used to make suicide attacks more lethal.
Pakistan had reeled from a wave of suicide attacks since mid-2007, including one that killed opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27. After the Waziristan operation, suicide attacks became far less frequent.
Motivated by gore
Before being taken by helicopter to the battleground, the journalists were given a presentation at divisional headquarters in Dera Ismail Khan, on the banks of the Indus river.
Major-General Tariq Khan said his troops had recovered 50 boys whom the militants were training to be suicide bombers.
Many of the boys told the soldiers they wanted to grow up to be doctors or pilots. Khan laconically noted: 'There's some serious disconnect here.'
The journalists were shown a confiscated motivational video for militants, produced under the al Jihad banner, and shot in the Mehsud tribal lands.
One section showed about a dozen young boys in a classroom, all wearing white scarfs denoting their commitment to martyrdowm. Their instructor in the art of suicide attacks was masked, and was flanked by another bearing an assault rifle.
The projectionist failed to hear an officer's order to stop the video there because the next scenes were too gory.
Instead it played on, showing a boy of maybe 10 executing a blindfolded man kneeling on the ground.
The child shoots the man in the head. Urged to finish his victim off, the child fires again, the body jerks.
That scene segues into one of a handful of youths hacking off the head of a trussed-up man in uniform.
One of the butchers then holds the head aloft in triumph.
In the Mehsud lands such barbarity was very real.
Villagers said they would have suffered similar fates if they had resisted the Taliban occupation of their settlements. Some, of course, were willing recruits, others silently acquiesced.
When soldiers liberated the area, Khan recalled, women came out of caves in the hills 'screaming for us to kill these miscreants who had been stealing their children'.
Hostile territory
The army has occupied 400 sq km (150 sq mile) of Mehsud terrain, a parched land of serrated ridges, looming over valleys covered in low scrub near the meandering Tank Zam river.
Baitullah Mehsud, who hails from one of the least prestigious clans of the tribe, succeeded in setting up a state within a state, enforcing Taliban law.
Of the seven semi-autonomous ethnic Pashtun tribal regions, the two most hostile have been North and South Waziristan.
The army had never deployed in these areas until Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters fled there after U.S.-backed forces chased them from neighbouring Afghanistan in late 2001.
Around 25,000 regular army troops are now in the Waziristans, plus the Frontier Corps paramilitary recruited from local tribes.
President Pervez Musharraf became alarmed a couple of years ago that Taliban culture was spreading outside the tribal zone.
Nevertheless, the situation had worsened by mid-2007, until the army regained its grip and drove the Taliban back into the Mehsuds' mountain labyrinth, where Baitullah is now boxed in.
'We have the entire Mehsud territory encircled,' Khan said, adding that the army controlled all movement in and out of the area, and could respond quickly to any threat from its base at Jandola.
A new government, established in March, has engaged tribal elders to persuade the militant leader to cease operations from their territory. Having helped create a stronger negotiating position, the army is leaving it to the politicians.
Its next step will be to allow people in the camps to return to their homes, whereupon the army will pull back to positions occupying heights without being provocatively close to the villages of the fiercely independent tribespeople.