WANA, April 6: Tribal volunteers and supporters of a militant group dislodged Uzbek fighters from their positions and secured control of Shin Warsak and Zaghundai areas of the South Waziristan Agency late on Thursday night, while sporadic clashes continued in Azam Warsak and other parts of the restive region.

AFP quoted a security official as saying that the army had moved on Friday into the Shin Warsak area cleared of the foreign militants by the tribal fighters.

Officials and local people said Uzbek militants and their tribal collaborators had been flushed out of Shin Warsak and they also had vacated their positions in Zaghundai areas after overnight clashes with the tribal Lashkar. Reports said scattered firing was going on in some pockets of Azam Warsak and Kalosha areas on Friday.

Shin Warsak and Zaghundai were considered strongholds of foreign militants in the Ahmadzai Wazir tribe-dominated area of the agency. Officials said firing had stopped in the two areas where 13 bodies, seven of them of Uzbeks, had been found. There are conflicting reports about the number of casualties.

Sources said 16 bodies had been counted since clashes erupted in the area on Tuesday. But military officials put the number of casualties from both sides at 240, including 220 foreigners.

A senior government official quoting intelligence reports said that 150 Uzbeks and 20 tribesmen had been killed in the conflict. He said tribal volunteers had captured weapons and ammunitions from bunkers in Shin Warsak.

Local people said Uzbek militants had torched houses of the chief of the tribal Lashkar, Malik Shirin Jan, and his close relative in the Nergesi area of Azam Warsak on Thursday night. Malik Shirin’s brother Fazl had died in the clashes and his son and nephew had been wounded.

Bodies of two paramilitary soldiers killed in Shin Warsak were sent to their ancestral areas in Tank and Lakki Marwat, Frontier Region, on Friday.

The sources said pro-Uzbek militant commander Noor Islam and his supporters Maulvi Abbas and Javed Kurmazkhel had gone under ground and the Uzbeks had shifted their families to Zhob in Balochistan ahead of the conflict.

Meanwhile, a jirga of the Zalikhel tribe, a sub-clan of the Ahmadzai Wazir, has been convened in Wana, the agency headquarters, for Saturday to discuss its future line of action.

AFP adds: Troops entered the mountainous Shin Warsak area near Wana, the main town in the agency, a security official said.

“Army troops are now in Shin Warsak to secure the area,” the security official told AFP.

Early Friday, pro-government tribesmen stormed key bunkers occupied by the foreign militants, leaving around 20 militants dead, bringing the total in three days to more than 60.

Tribal fighters celebrated the capture of the bunkers by firing tracer rounds in the air that illuminated the sky over Wana, residents said.

The tribesmen overran several bunkers held by the Central Asian rebels, which were originally built by the army but vacated in 2005.

“They were very strong bunkers and Uzbek fighters were well entrenched there. But the tribesmen managed to flush them out,” local administration chief Mohammad Hassanzada told AFP.

“Some 20 bodies were found lying there before dawn and more casualties were feared as the fighting continued throughout the night,” a security official said.

Residents said the dead in the clashes overnight included seven tribesmen, one of whom was the driver of their main commander, Mullah Nazir, the former local Taliban leader.