Pakistan: Taliban Captures, Beheads Seven Pakistani Security Personnel

The Express Tribune (Pakistan) – “The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has announced to an already-stricken population of Pakistan that it beheaded the seven Pakistani security personnel that it had kidnapped on June 21 in Laddah, South Waziristan. Its spokesman has proclaimed that ‘the heads of the slain soldiers would soon be produced before the media’. He also denied the army claim that it had killed 10 terrorists; he said only two had actually died. The TTP also enriched itself with the weapons captured from the army personnel.

The tragedy of South Waziristan goes on. This was the place where we made our first mistakes. We are now more focused on the villainies of the US and the Nato, whom we are denying passage into Afghanistan, and are busy ‘reinterpreting’ the Taliban as paid killers of the US, while sheltering some of them as they cross the Durand Line and kill Americans getting ready to depart the region after being defeated. If this is a victory, it is killing us. We are appeasing our tormentors by making ‘adjustments’ at all levels — judicial, political, economic and military.

In March 2004, militants ambushed an army convoy near the village of Sarwakai, close to Wana in South Waziristan. A dozen soldiers were found at the site and the decapitated bodies of a number of others who had been taken prisoner by the assailants were found near the area days later. The army went in to take the killers to task. Zahid Hussain, in his book, The Scorpion’s Tail, writes:

‘The clerics of the powerful Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad issued a fatwa declaring the resistance in Waziristan a jihad and called on the people to not give Islamic burials to the soldiers killed while fighting the tribesmen. In obedience to the clerics, many parents of the soldiers refused to receive the bodies of their sons. Public opinion in the region turned more hostile toward the military. The operation also angered some individuals within the officer corps and several Pashtun officers were court-martialled for refusing to fight’.” Read more.