WANA, June 9: At least 15 soldiers and 20 suspected militants were killed in day-long fighting triggered by simultaneous attacks on military posts in South Waziristan on Wednesday, knowledgeable sources said.

The Inter Services Public Relations did not give any figures: it only said that security forces had suffered a few casualties during exchanges of fire. However, knowledgeable sources told Dawn that attacks on two military posts had left 15 soldiers dead, nine of them belonging to the paramilitary Frontier Corps and six to the Pakistan Army.

One official source put the number of security personnel killed at 13. At least 10 paramilitary soldiers, who were wounded in the attacks, were being treated at the Scouts Hospital in Wana. The number of military personnel injured could not be ascertained.

Government officials said 20 suspected militants were killed while one injured militant was captured in the fighting. They said that the bodies of six suspected militants, believed to be foreigners, were retrieved till Wednesday evening.

"The militants have buried seven of their dead comrades in Shakai, while the rest of the bodies are lying in the dry river- bed that could not be retrieved because of fighting," one official source said.

At least three civilians, two men and a woman, were killed in crossfire when militants tried to force them out of a place to take up position there against the security forces. They belonged to the Khanokhel Mehsud tribe and were living in one of the three houses built underneath the Torwam bridge on the Tiarza-Luddah Road.

A Khasadar, a tribal levy, also was caught in the crossfire and was killed, the officials said. Locals in Tiarza, where one of the two attacks took place, said the casualty figure on both sides could be higher.

They said that four of the eight suspected militants killed were local Mehsud tribesmen. "We don't know what is happening. We are all stuck here. All that we know is that there is heavy fighting going on.

All I can tell from the intensity of the firing is that the casualty figure would be very high," Dr Muhammad Arif, a resident of Tiarza, told Dawn by phone. According to the official account, suspected militants launched simultaneous attacks on two military checkposts about 10 kilometres apart at around 4.30am.

But tribesmen said the fighting began after the militants had occupied one of the posts and the besieged soldiers called for reinforcements. Brig Mehmood Shah, head of the security in Fata, told Dawn the militants launched the attack with mortars, rockets and machine-guns on the military post on the Tiarza- Luddah Road near the recently-built Torwam bridge, about 20km to the west of Wana.

The other attack was launched almost simultaneously on a military post about 10km from the Torwam post, on the Wana-Inzar Road, about 25km to the west of Wana. Both the checkposts served as entry points in the foothills of the Shakai valley, an area widely considered to be used as a hideout by hundreds of foreign militants.

Thousands of armed tribal volunteers, under pressure from the government, have been searching for foreign militants in Shakai for the last two days, but without any luck.

The lashkar abandoned its search on Wednesday following the twin-attack and returned to Wana. Tribesmen said the search was abandoned after local tribes refused to cooperate with the lashkar.

A grand jirga of the Ahmadzai Wazir tribe has now been summoned at Azam Warsak on Thursday to discuss the situation and chalk out the future course of action. Brig Shah said the militants were most likely Uzbeks and Chechens. "It was a mixed bag."

He said the six bodies recovered from the scene of the fighting also had foreign features. He said it was during the encounter that three foreign militants were killed while a fourth one was injured and captured.

"The fighting was intense. We also used artillery," he said. Gunship helicopters took to the air but did not carry out any bombing due to cloudy weather. A senior official said that fresh reinforcements were sent to the two check posts to bring the situation under control.

The army also used artillery from the Zari Noor brigade headquarters to pound militants' positions in the mountains. The officials and top tribal militant Nek Muhammad were quick to accuse each other of violating the April 24 'rapprochement' reached at Shakai that won amnesty for five top tribal militants including Nek, in return for a pledge to remain peaceful and not to use Pakistani soil against any other country.

The 27-year-old Nek and his four fellow clansmen have been accused by the authorities of harbouring and helping foreign militants. A spokesman for the ISPR said in a statement that the government was following a political process to resolve the issue of foreign militants amicably and without using force.

"However, miscreants in an utter violation of the agreement and breach of trust, Muslim values, tribal customs and local traditions, resorted to unprovoked firing on the posts of the security forces.

"This should be an eye-opener for those who, oblivious of the ground realities, continue to maintain that there are no miscreants in the area," the statement concluded.

But Nek Muhammad in an interview with a foreign news organization hurled the same charge at the government. "It is the government which is committing excesses against our tribesmen and these attacks are the result of those excesses," he contended.

"If the government does not stop the operation there will be attacks in Peshawar, Islamabad and Karachi," Nek Muhammad warned. Without accepting responsibility for the attacks, the tribal militant, who had once fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan, rebuffed the government's claim regarding casualties among militants. "Only one of the mujahideen embraced martyrdom," he told Dawn on telephone in Wana.

Residents in Wana said the fighting had stopped by the evening in Tiara and on the Wana-Inzar Road but there were fears of resumption of attacks elsewhere during the night and on Thursday.

Senior officials said that the foreign militants were still hiding in Shakai and the army was contemplating a major operation. "There will be a strong reaction," commented one senior official.

"The writ of the government will have to be established now. We have been befooling ourselves by trying to encourage lashkars and jirgas. The tribal institutions have weakened and eroded over the period," the official commented. Locals in Shakai said that hundreds of families, with women and children, were moving to safe location for fear of a military operation in the area.