Pakistan infantry rebuff attacks kill 40 militants

KALAYA, Pakistan Sun April 4, 2010 5:25am EDT Related News Twenty Taliban, five Pakistani soldiers killed in fightWed, March 31 2010Pakistani jets kill twenty-six Taliban in OrakzaiTue, March thirty 2010In Afghan end-game, India gets that falling feelingMon, March twenty-nine 2010Better Pakistan-U.S. ties underpinned by Afghan aimsSun, March twenty-eight 2010U.S. barb set upon kills 4 in PakistanSat, March twenty-seven 2010

KALAYA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani forces corroborated by armoured column and artillery repulsed Taliban attacks in northwestern Orakzai on Sunday, murdering scarcely 40 militants, a supervision central said.

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Orakzai, southwest of Peshawar, has turn a Taliban heart given security forces mounted offensives opposite their strongholds in alternative tools of the racial Pashtun northwest over the past year, security officials say.

Pakistan, an critical U.S. fan has not long ago stepped up assaults in Orakzai and the militants have been retaliating.

Sajid Khan, a supervision central in the region, told Reuters that multiform dozen militants pounded a security post in a encampment early on Sunday.

"They used rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and appurtenance guns, but the soldiers" reply was discerning and tough," pronounced Khan, who is formed in Kalaya, the region"s main town.

Twenty-five militants were killed and 10 bleeding in the clash, he said.

Hours later, militants ambushed a infantry procession in a circuitously encampment and at slightest a dozen militants were killed, Khan said.

He pronounced usually one supervision infantryman was bleeding in the clashes.

There was no eccentric acknowledgment of Khan"s misadventure tolls but a security official, who declined to be identified, gave identical total in the clashes.

Pakistan"s movement opposite militants over the past year has won U.S. regard and eased fears that the militants could bluster the state or even seize the chief arsenal.

Pakistani movement opposite militants along the Afghan limit is seen as consequential to U.S. efforts to move fortitude to Afghanistan, quite as Washington sends some-more infantry there to quarrel a distracted Taliban rebellion prior to a light withdrawal starts in 2011.

According to security officials, about 170 militants have been killed in multiform weeks of clashes in Orakzai, but there has been no eccentric corroboration of the figures.

Orakzai was a building of Pakistani Taliban personality Hakimullah Mehsud who is at large believed to have been killed in a U.S. worker set upon in the North Waziristan segment on the Afghan limit in January.

(Reporting by Hassan Mehmood; Writing by Kamran Haider; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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