KHAR, Pakistan — Taliban fighters killed five Pakistani troops in surprise raids, stepping up attacks to widen the conflict in the tribal belt and hobble a major ground offensive, officials said Monday.
Pakistan has claimed a string of successes during a 10-day offensive to crush Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in South Waziristan, pressing its most ambitious battle yet in a tribal area infested with Al-Qaeda-linked rebels.
Ground troops backed by attack helicopters, warplanes and heavy artillery have been drawn into fighting but commanders say resistance has been more limited than during three previous offensives into South Waziristan.
More than 150 kilometres (94 miles) further north, Taliban armed with rockets and guns stormed a military check post in Bajaur, killing four soldiers in a surprise night-time assault, security and government officials said.
"First they lobbed several rockets and then approached the post and opened fire with automatic weapons," local administration official Ghulam Saidullah told AFP by telephone.
Security officials said troops retaliated, killing six Taliban militants.
A Pakistan military helicopter crashed in the same area late Saturday, killing six troops after a routine supply mission.
Although the military blamed a technical fault for the crash, the Taliban chief in Bajaur, Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, claimed in a telephone call to AFP from an unknown location that his fighters shot down the aircraft.
Taliban militants also attacked a security post in Hangu, another district northwest of South Waziristan, in which one soldier was killed and three wounded late Sunday, a senior military official said.
"Troops strongly retaliated killing 10 militants," he said. Residents said that bodies of some militants still lay in the area Monday.
"It seems the Taliban effort is to step up militant activity to shift focus of troops in South Waziristan," the military official told AFP.
"Our own strategy is not to allow the Taliban to concentrate in one place but keep them scattered. Neither do we want them to reach South Waziristan to help their colleagues and disturb the resistance ratio," he added.
A local official said the Taliban had stepped up attacks on check posts in Bajaur, which like South Waziristan is part of Pakistan's largely autonomous tribal belt on the Afghan border considered a sanctuary for Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants plotting attacks on the West and within Pakistan.
In February, the military declared mountainous Bajaur clear after a six-month offensive which it claimed killed more than 1,500 Taliban.
"The move is to divert the military's attention from South Waziristan," said administration official Jamil Khan.
"This is also in line with TTP chief Hakimullah Mehsud's recent warning of revenge attacks across the country," Khan said.
The Taliban fired rockets at check posts on the outskirts of Bajaur's main town Khar overnight wounding two soldiers, security officials said.
On the 10th day of the South Waziristan offensive, designed to deal a knockout blow to the Taliban, the military said troops were engaged in heavy fighting on their advance towards Taliban strongholds Sararogha and Ladha.
The army claims to have captured the hometown of TTP chief Mehsud and Tarkona Narai, one of the Islamists' mountain strongholds which overlooks a key junction and which the army said contained a series of Taliban bunkers.
The military says 178 militants and 24 troops have been killed but none of the information provided by the army is possible to verify with communication lines down and access banned to journalists and aid workers.
More than 140,000 people have fled South Waziristan, mostly to neighbouring Dera Ismail Khan where tensions have soared between the incoming families and locals who consider Mehsuds, clansmen of the TTP leader, a security threat.
Pakistan sent nearly 30,000 troops into action against an estimated 10,000 Taliban fighters in South Waziristan after a series of major attacks in cities that have left nearly 200 people dead so far this month.
The nuclear-armed nation is on the frontline of the US-led war against Islamist extremists and the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan with two years of bombings killing more than 2,280 people.
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