500,000 set to flee Taliban clashes

PANICKED civilians fled Pakistan’s Swat district yesterday as the government prepared to shelter 500,000 displaced people and clashes with Taliban fighters heightened fears that a peace deal was about to collapse.

The spiralling insecurity made a mockery of a ceasefire on the eve of President Asif Ali Zardari’s first meeting with US counterpart Barack Obama, amid Washington’s concerns that Taliban and al-Qaida linked militants are threatening Pakistan’s existence.

Bedraggled men, women in burkas and children piled onto pick-up trucks, and animals were led through streets in the rush to flee Mingora, the main town in the one-time ski resort, devastated by a nearly two-year Taliban insurgency.

“I don’t want my unborn baby to have even the slightest idea what suicide attacks and bomb blasts are. That’s why I’m leaving Mingora with my husband,” said a sobbing and heavily pregnant Bakht Zehra.

“For God’s sake tell me where I can bring up my child where there are no suicide attacks,” she cried.

“Zehra and I had a love marriage. I don’t want to die. I want to live for my wife and my baby,” said her 25-year-old husband, Adnan Ahmad, who had a mobile phone shop in Mingora and is studying for a degree in English literature.

The military ordered neighbourhoods around Mingora to evacuate and announced a break in a curfew for the displaced to flee – sparking fears of an imminent new offensive – as bullets rattled through parts of town.

“In view of this situation in Swat, at least 500,000 people can migrate from that area. Camps are being established for them,” North West Frontier Province information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain told a news conference.

“They were in the thousands,” Hussain said when asked how many people left yesterday. He said the number was fewer than 10,000 but there were no precise statistics.

Zardari’s administration came under fierce criticism for ratifying a February agreement with an Islamist cleric to put three million people in the north-west under sharia law in a bid to end a Taliban uprising.

Taliban attacked two police buildings in Saidu Sharif, the old capital of Swat, where clashes broke out between militants and security forces, local police and an intelligence official said.

“There is now heavy fighting going on between the militants and the security forces in the area,” said local police official Danish War Khan.

In the administrative capital Mingora, the military said armed militant patrols “threatened lives” and that an attack on security checkpoints wounding four personnel violated the February peace agreement.

Witnesses said “large numbers” of residents fled in panic, although the military swiftly withdrew its evacuation order. “We have now suspended this order and people are directed not to vacate their homes because the government has no immediate plan to launch an operation in these areas,” said local military spokes- man Major Nasir Khan.

Yesterday, a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into the back of a paramilitary jeep at a checkpoint near Bara, where the north-west city of Peshawar runs into the Taliban and al-Qaida-infested tribal area of Khyber.

Police and hospital officials said four civilians and a paramilitary soldier were killed and 21 wounded.

Zardari meets Obama today, hoping to secure a massive US aid package to equip the military better and boost development in his nuclear-armed state.