PAKISTAN: Pakistani forces said they were fighting a fierce battle yesterday with 300-400 foreign militants and Pakistani tribal allies after encircling them near the Afghan border.
Troops pounded the besieged militants, who might include Osama bin Laden's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri as well as many other al-Qaeda fighters, with artillery for most of the day while helicopters attacked them from above.
"They are surrounded and they are trying to break the cordon and get away," military spokesman Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan told a news briefing in the capital, Islamabad.
He dismissed reports al-Zawahri had managed to get away. "From the cordon we have put around these places, we are certain nobody would have escaped," he said.
Other Pakistani officials denied financial market rumours that bin Laden himself had been captured.
A Taliban spokesman was quoted as demanding that US and Pakistan forces call off the hunt for Taliban and al-Qaeda militants along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
"We will carry out more attacks against international coalition forces if they continue to chase us," he said in taped comments reported by Al Jazeera television.
Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, ousted from power in Afghanistan by US-led forces in late 2001, was safe, he said.
President Pervez Musharraf said on Thursday the ferocity of the resistance led generals to believe the rebels were shielding a "high-value target".
Government officials have said the prominent figure might be al-Zawahri. But Gen Sultan said authorities had been unable to determine if al-Zawahri was actually there.
Al-Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor, is regarded as the brains of al-Qaeda. He is believed to be one of the key figures behind the September 11th, 2001, attacks on the United States.
The fighting, pitting thousands of government troops against several hundred militants, is in the remote, often lawless and largely autonomous region of Waziristan, centred on an area to the west of the town of Wana that includes Shin Warsak village.
Western intelligence sources say al-Zawahri and bin Laden are believed to be close to each other, somewhere in Waziristan.
A government official in the border region, who asked not to be named, said 15 soldiers had been killed in the fighting since Thursday. "There's ferocious resistance but a house-to-house search has started on the outskirts of Shin Warsak," the official said.
Sixteen soldiers and 24 suspected militants, including some foreigners, were killed on Tuesday, the first day of fighting.
There was no word on casualties among the militants yesterday.
"We are closing in on them. Their defence seems to be dying down," said senior security official Brig Mehmood Shah.
"Either they've run out of ammunition or they want to surprise us when we get closer," he said.
Brig Shah denied that 15 more Pakistani soldiers had been killed, saying the government side had suffered no losses since Tuesday.
US-led troops are also striking from the Afghan side in what the Pentagon is calling a "hammer and anvil" operation, and Afghanistan has sent extra troops to the border to stop militants crossing over to escape the onslaught.
The FBI lists al-Zawahri among its "Most Wanted Terrorists" with a bounty of $25 million on his head. He has been indicted in the United States for his alleged role in the August 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. - (Reuters)