Pakistan - Waziristan offensive - government adviser interview

Thousands flee to mountains as anti-Taliban offensive slows down

by Tony Cross

Article published on the 2009-10-21 Latest update 2009-10-21 16:50 TU

Pakistani Prime Ministerial adviser Shahnaz Wazir Ali at RFI
(Photo: Tony Cross)

Pakistani security officials say that their offensive in the Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan will take longer than initially predicted. And a government adviser has told RFI that thousands of villagers are wandering in the mountains, after fleeing the fighting.

The military last week declared that the operation would be brief as winter is approaching and snowfall will impede military operations.

But officials today say that troops are advancing slowly through difficult terrain.

The terrain is similar to that over the border in Afghanistan, points out Shahnaz Wazir Ali, an adviser to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who is visiting Paris.

"The border areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border are very similar, with the rocky mountains, craggy mountains, ravines - very, very difficult to access," she says.

Those conditions led US-led troops to revise their predictions for the war there after arriving in 2001, she says

The military reports heavy clashes on the heights overlooking Kotkai, the home of Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud. But the miltary has yet to storm the village.

As military jets pound villages, thousands of villagers have left their homes and many are far from main towns where refugee camps are to be set up.

The government expects 200,000 of the 600,000-strong population to be displaced, says Shahnaz Wazir Ali.

And, she adds, there is even less infrastructure than in the Swat valley, where two million fled fighting earlier this year, so many of them are wandering in the mountains.

"Swat and Malakand were connected by a fairly large network of accessible roads," she says. "Waziristan is not like that. So when people do get displaced from their homes, sometimes it is not that easy for the state to reach out to the remotest areas of very rugged and mountainous terrains to see where families are going."

The government did not set up camps for displaced people before the offensive in order to avoid warning their opponents that it was being prepared, she says.

But now "the government's machinery is working to provide the necessary support, the necessary living conditions".

"I would say, of course, they would be very basic - people to be housed in tents and camps."