PESHAWAR, Oct 2: Eight suspected Al Qaeda fighters and two soldiers of Pakistan Army were killed in a gunbattle in a small hamlet in South Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan on Thursday.

Two other armymen were wounded during Operation Al-Mizan that began at Baghar village, 45km northwest from Wana, early in the morning and continued late into the evening, an official said.

Eighteen suspects, all foreigners, were rounded up, he said and added that arms and ammunition and some surveillance equipment were recovered from the scene of the battle.

The Inter-Services Public Relations had put the number of dead Al Qaeda suspects at 12.

Later, talking to Dawn, an ISPR spokesman said: “We have done the body count now and it is eight. All are foreigners. The operation has been successfully completed and all terrorists have been flushed out of the area.”

“We are not going to let any terrorist go,” the political agent of South Waziristan, Azam Khan, told this correspondent on telephone from Wana.

Officials said troops from the newly-created Quick Reaction Force were flown in from its base in Tarbela while Pakistan Army’s regulars and paramilitary forces were moved in to the tribal region from the adjoining Hangu district.

The operation was launched after information by an intelligence agency about the presence of foreign militants in Baghar, a village comprising 50 to 60 houses located in the rugged mountains, a few kilometres from the Paktika province of Afghanistan.

“We have shown our commitment to fight terrorism. We are ever ready to take action wherever there are foreign elements in the tribal region,” Mr Azam said.

The official said the militants were asked to surrender but they opened fire on the troops who had besieged the village.

“There were women and children who came out from one of the houses and surrendered to the authorities but those holed up in other houses opened fire,” he said, adding “the level of their resistance was high.”

Some militants, the official said, had taken positions in the nearby orchards and they were firing at security forces. Pakistani gunship helicopters came in and fired at their hideout, he added.

Baghar is located about 1.5km to the northwest of Angor Adda, a dusty border town, which has seen bombing by the US planes in recent days. The bombs were dropped in an attempt to stamp out the Taliban-Al Qaeda militants believed to be regrouping there to launch attacks inside Afghanistan.

The Pakistani tribal region borders Birmal district of Paktika which has been under the control of the Taliban for the past six weeks.

The official said those killed appeared to be Chechens. “Their nationalities are being confirmed but it appears that they were all Chechens,” he said.

He said 18 foreign militants, three of them wounded, had been taken into custody, adding they were also thought to be Chechens. He said four women and six children, who had given themselves up to the authorities, were also of foreign origin.

A cache of arms and ammunition and some surveillance equipment were recovered from one of the houses, the official said.

Thursday’s was the second major operation against suspected Al Qaeda militants in the area. Ten Pakistani soldiers were killed during an operation in Azam Warsak in June last year, an area that lies 12km southwest of Baghar. Two Chechen militants were also killed in that operation. Reports had suggested then that more than 30 Chechens, including women and children, had escaped the army dragnet.

The official observed that Chechens had come to Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban to receive training in guerilla warfare. They crossed over and taken refuge in Pakistan’s tribal region after the US-led international coalition ousted the militia from power. “These were basically the people who had nowhere to go,” he said.

ISPR spokesman Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan was quoted by a news agency as saying there was a possibility that the militants might have been involved in this week’s attack on US forces in Shkin area of Afghanistan, killing one American soldier.

The Pakistan Army had called off an operation in South

AFP adds: Journalists taken by the army to the scene as fighting raged were shown four bodies covered in shrouds, 10 prisoners and a massive cache of anti-tank mines, grenades, rockets and machine guns seized from the hideout.