Swat Valley

They loaded their dirt-caked tents, clothes, bed frames and sacks of flour onto trucks early Monday and then piled into buses, desperate to leave the sweltering camps in northwestern Pakistan where they had lived for more than two months -- but unsure what awaited them in their war-ravaged hometowns.

Four decades ago, a rangy civil servant in charge of overseeing the forested ridges and brick-hut villages of Pakistan's Swat Valley sought a pastime to get through slow days. He dabbled in poetry, composing haiku in longhand. His wife read the poems and called them "rubbish. " "Why don't you write about something you know?" Jamil Ahmad recalled his wife, Helga, telling him. She said his focus should be the tribes of Pakistan's northwest frontier, where Ahmad had worked for 15 years.

The battle for the crucial Swat Valley city of Mingora began Saturday as Pakistani troops waged fierce street combat with Taliban militants and began the most difficult test yet in the monthlong offensive to regain much of northwest Pakistan from insurgents.

The death toll in a suicide bomb blast at a Pakistani military training school rose to 32 on Thursday, underscoring militants' ability to strike sensitive installations despite army offensives aimed at uprooting the insurgents. The attack occurred at the Punjab Regiment Center in the northwestern city of Mardan just as cadets were going through morning exercises. Zeeshan Haider, a local police official, said a teenage boy dressed in the uniform of a nearby school appeared on the grounds and detonated the explosives-laden vest he was wearing.

Pakistani jets screamed over this Taliban-controlled town Friday and bombed suspected militant positions as hundreds of thousands fled and trapped residents appealed for a pause in the fighting so they could escape. Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said 140 militants had been killed in the last 24 hours, in addition to about 150 already reported slain. He didn't provide figures for civilian deaths, but witnesses and local news reports say that some have been killed.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari signed a regulation to put a northwestern district under Islamic law as part of a peace deal with militants, after coming under intense pressure from his party's members and other lawmakers. Islamic militants have terrorized the Swat Valley for nearly two years, seeking to impose their own justice system. Zardari's move was sure to further anger rights activists and feed fears among Western allies that the valley, bordering Afghanistan, will become a haven for militants.

Face down before a crowd, the teenage girl shrieks and writhes, begging for mercy. But the three masked men holding her down merely tighten their grip while a fourth man whips her again and again. The video of a 17-year-old girl being publicly flogged by the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley has galvanized the nation, drawing protests from human rights groups, denunciations from the central government and expressions of revulsion from many Pakistanis.

A suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into a checkpoint in Pakistan's northwestern Swat Valley, killing at least five people Saturday. It was the first suicide attack in Swat since July, when the government said its forces had mostly driven out Pakistani Taliban fighters from the area in its largest offensive against the militants in years. About 2 million people fled the area during the fighting. A day earlier, Swat residents who had returned staged celebrations of Pakistan's independence day. In some places, women danced in the streets -- an act of defiance, since the hard-line Islamist Taliban banned women from public during their rule.

Members of the 40-day-old tribal militia in this Swat Valley village come in all shapes, from all walks of life. Some struggle to fasten bandoleers around pot bellies; some haven't finished high school. They are doctors and teachers, wealthy landowners and dirt-poor wheat farmers. Some make their way with Kalashnikov rifles slung over their shoulders, others with only a wooden stick in hand. What unites them is the memory of the Taliban's brutality, a time when the militant organization took over Kanju and the rest of the Swat Valley.

Pakistani commandos dropped from helicopters Wednesday into an area behind Taliban lines about 80 miles from Islamabad, the capital, and regained control of a key town, the army said. But authorities faced a fresh challenge after militants seized a police station, holding dozens of officers hostage. Helicopters dropped troops before 8 a.m. near Daggar, the main town in the Buner district, the army said. The area has seen fighting between the military and Taliban forces for several days.

The death toll in a suicide bomb blast at a military training school in the northwest city of Mardan rose to 32 Thursday in an attack that underscored militants' ability to strike sensitive Pakistani installations despite a series of army offensives aimed at uprooting the country's homegrown insurgency. The attack occurred at the Punjab Regiment Center, an army training camp, just as cadets had assembled on the grounds and were going through their morning exercises. Zeeshan Haider, a local police official, said a teenage boy dressed in a school uniform appeared on the grounds and detonated the explosives-laden suicide vest he was wearing.

The Obama administration announced Friday that it would seek an additional $2 billion in aid for Pakistan's military, despite continuing disagreements with Islamabad over the war against militants. The five-year package, which supplements $7.5 billion in civilian aid to Pakistan, would raise annual military aid to about $400 million a year from $300 million. The plan is subject to congressional approval and won't come up for consideration until next year, congressional sources said.

People here remember when hundreds of Pakistani Taliban militants roamed through the forested ridges flanking the Chail River, armed not with AK-47s but with axes. Employing termite-like efficiency, the militants felled and carted away vast swaths of Himalayan cedar, blue pine and oak, leaving mountainsides dotted with stumps. Through illegal logging, the Taliban generated quick cash to keep its arsenals stocked. But nearly a decade of tree felling by militants and 35 years of deforestation by unscrupulous timber businesses and wealthy landowners have had an unforeseen consequence.

Pakistan's army chief Friday ordered an investigation of a video circulating on the Internet that purportedly shows the firing squad execution of six blindfolded Pakistanis by men dressed in what appear to be Pakistani army uniforms. The call for the investigation by the army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, reverses the army's initial reaction when the video first surfaced last month. At that time, military authorities called the video fake and denied that any Pakistani soldier could be involved in extrajudicial killings.

The view from an open cargo door of a U.S. Marine helicopter showed what the relentless floodwater has done to this small mountain village. Near toppled electricity towers, hotel rooftops severed from their walls lay in the rushing water of the Swat River. Segments of bridges have been swept away. At one span, only concrete buttresses were left standing. As the helicopter touched down, Pakistanis with blank, tired faces, some with whatever clothes they could salvage stuffed into small plastic bags, desperately waited their turn to be taken to safety.

Pakistan's top military leader, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, will serve in his post for three more years, Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gillani announced Thursday, a move that for the U.S. is likely to ensure that Pakistan maintains a dual strategy of battling home-grown insurgents while pursuing talks with militants fighting Western forces in Afghanistan. The announcement, made by Gillani in a televised address to the nation shortly before 11 p.m., was far from unexpected.

Naseem Hayat fights a war he knows police shouldn't be asked to fight. With just a handful of officers, the 48-year-old police subinspector spends his days and nights opening car trunks, never knowing whether the next vehicle that pulls up is the one primed to explode. Two months ago, that's exactly what happened. A white pickup pulled up, then rammed a police truck around which several of Hayat's officers were standing.

A U.N. official and a guard were shot and killed Thursday during an attempted kidnapping at a displacement camp in northwestern Pakistan, underscoring the level of violence plaguing the country even as government leaders say it's safe for camp dwellers to return to the volatile Swat Valley. The slayings occurred at the Kacha Garhi camp outside Peshawar, northwestern Pakistan's largest city. Zelle Usman, a Pakistani field officer with the Office of the U.N.

With each stroke of the teenage Taliban militant's lash, the girl's muffled cries pierced the air of this Swat Valley town. The men in the crowd watched silently, aching to intervene but frozen by gunmen pacing in front of them with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. A year later, those men say the images from that day remain etched in their memories. The teenage militant wore white. The girl, a 17-year-old named Chand Bibi, stood behind a hastily made screen of sheets and shawls as she was flogged.

A key Afghan Taliban leader has been arrested in northwestern Pakistan, that nation's intelligence sources said Monday, the fourth top Taliban figure to be seized in Pakistan in the last month. Mullah Abdul Kabir was arrested last week, the sources said. They would not disclose where, but CNN and Fox News reported that he was captured in Nowshera, a largely Pashtun city near Peshawar. During the Taliban regime, Kabir was a finance minister and governor of Nangarhar province. He is believed to have played a significant role in the insurgency's operations in eastern Afghanistan.