Pakistan joins war against Al Qaeda in its tribal areas

"They all managed to slip away in the darkness, while the two Chechens fought with machine guns," says a military source in the area.

A Pakistan Army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, says two concerns weighed on the minds of the personnel during the operation.

"There were some women and children inside the building, and there were other houses around it, and because of the concerns the law enforcement personnel had to proceed with care and avoid use of lethal force," he says.

Sources in South Waziristan say troop reinforcements arrived Thursday in Wana, the main town in the area, to beef up the search for the escaped fighters, who are believed to include Chechens and Arabs.

Authorities have summoned tribal chieftains from the area to Wana to tell them to cooperate in the operation or risk punitive action, the sources say. Authorities reminded tribal chiefs that under a 1901 law governing the semiautonomous tribal areas, it is their responsibility to ensure no unlawful activity takes place.

Yesterday, troops were conducting house-to-house searches, and the entire area was under curfew. Soldiers were making forays into the mountains to scan cave hideouts, sources there say.

Witnesses say some 20 tribesmen have been taken into custody, and the authorities have demolished several houses, a form of reprisal against suspected criminals under the Frontier Crimes Regulations, a harsh law inherited from British colonial rule.

The tribal territory is widely believed to be a sanctuary for Al Qaeda and Taliban cadres fleeing the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan, and speculation continues that bin Laden himself may be hiding somewhere in the region with local support.

Pakistani police say Al Qaeda is in league with several banned extremist and militant groups in the country, and this alliance may be behind the two recent terrorist bombings in the southern port city of Karachi, one outside the US Consulate.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan yesterday, about 100 US soldiers, accompanied by 50 Afghan fighters, were scouring the rugged mountains in an area where a former Taliban official says bin Laden maintained several hide-outs.

The operation is under way in Kunar Province, north of Jalalabad along the Pakistan border, Afghan and US officials say. First word of the operation came Tuesday, when US officials at Bagram Air Base said American forces came under mortar fire in Kunar but suffered no casualties.

"The Americans are here in Kunar ... but I can't say for sure whether there are Al Qaeda here," a local government spokesman, Saeed Mohammed Safi, told the Associated Press. "We have a lot of mountains and gorges and forests where [Al Qaeda] can hide. But I haven't seen any," he said Wednesday.

In Washington, US officials said that important al-Qaida or Taliban figures may be hiding in the area.

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