23 September 2008

A good start

Rico says it pains him to exult over the violent death of anyone, but he will make an exception for the al Qaeda assholes currently being shot to ribbons in Pakistan:
Security forces backed by helicopter gunships and artillery killed more than 60 insurgents in northwest Pakistan in offensives aimed at denying haven to al Qaeda and Taliban militants.
More than fifty of the insurgents, along with one soldier, died in clashes since Monday in Kohat, a region that borders Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal areas, said an army spokesman, Major Murad Khan. He added that the military had retaken control of a key mountain tunnel from the insurgents.
In Bajaur, a nearby tribal region, security forces killed at least ten militants during a continuing offensive there, a government official, Iqbal Khattak, said.
That operation, which began in early August, has won praise from U.S. officials worried about rising violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan but has triggered retaliatory suicide bombings elsewhere in Pakistan. Some officials believe that the weekend bombing of the Marriott Hotel may have been a response to the Bajaur operations, which the army says have left more than 700 suspected militants dead.
A Pakistani Army spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, has said that Bajaur has been turned into a "mega-sanctuary" for militants and that the military is determined to flush them out. However, a rash of U.S. cross-border operations in neighboring tribal regions, including suspected missile strikes and a ground assault, underscore Washington's concerns that Pakistan is either unwilling or incapable of rooting out extremists on its own.
President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan had a meeting scheduled Tuesday with President George W. Bush on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, with the cross-border attacks sure to be a topic. Zardari told NBC News in a recent interview that he welcomed intelligence help from the United States, but not its troops. "Give us the intelligence and we will do the job," he said. "It's better done by our forces than yours."
Late Monday, a Dubai-based TV channel, Al Arabiya, said it had received a tape from a shadowy group calling itself Fedayeen al-Islam, or Muslim Commandos, claiming responsibility for the Marriott bombing and calling on Pakistan to end its cooperation with the United States.
Separately, a spokesman for British Airways said Tuesday that it was "indefinitely" suspending its flights to and from Pakistan "in light of the current security situation." And the company that runs four visa application centers for the British Embassy in Pakistan has closed them pending a security review, an embassy spokesman, Aidan Liddle, said.

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