Indian Army Conducting Surgical Strikes Against ULFA: Army Chief
Dated 12/1/2007
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Army helicopters ferried in soldiers and scoured India's mountainous northeast for suspected rebels who killed 69 people in a series of attacks in the past week, an army commander said on Friday.
Hundreds of soldiers moved in trucks and on foot to look for bases operated by the United Liberation Front of Asom in Assam state, said Maj. Gen. N. C. Marwah, the army commander leading the operations.
Authorities blamed the ULFA for the attacks over Jan. 5-8. The ULFA has not claimed responsibility for any of the attacks.
"We are carrying out a relentless campaign against the terrorists in the northeastern states. Based on intelligence reports, we are making surgical strikes in places where the rebels may be hiding," Gen. J. J. Singh, India's army chief told reporters in New Delhi.
Most of the ULFA militants operate in groups of about 10 to 12 from hide-outs in the dense tropical jungles that straddle the states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya which has made the task of locating them difficult.
But the army had "launched an all out campaign" to smoke them out from their hide-outs, Singh said.
In Gauhati, A. Kanth, the state police chief, said counterinsurgency operations have been intensified in Arunachal Pradesh state which shares a porous border with Myanmar where the ULFA is known to have several bases.
At least 10,000 people in Assam, most of them civilians, have died over the last three decades in fighting between government forces and separatists, including the ULFA and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland, which wants autonomy for Assam's Bodo ethnic minority.
However, the guerrillas appear to have successfully evaded government forces after the latest attacks.
"These rebels have now gone underground, either staying at safe hideouts or have melted away among the locals. Some of them have crossed over to adjoining Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland states," Gen. Marwah told The Associated Press.
The state government says 73 people have been killed in Assam since rebel-led shooting and bombing attacks on Jan. 5. They included 61 Hindi-speaking migrant workers, eight officials killed separately by a land mine, and 4 ULFA militants killed by soldiers.
Nearly 8,000 migrants, mostly from northern states, have been shifted to 50 relief camps in five districts of the state to escape further rebel attacks, said state Health Minister Himanta Biswa.
More than 20,000 army, police and paramilitary soldiers have been hunting through ULFA strongholds in Assam.
"We are using helicopters on a regular basis in the past few days to scan the area and airlift troops to inaccessible and interior parts in quick time as we need to react very early when militants strike in far-flung locations," Gen. Marwah said.
He said up to 30 ULFA rebels armed with Russian-made Kalashnikov assault rifles and machine guns were involved in last week's attacks.
The militants say the Central Government in New Delhi ' 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) to the west ' exploits the northeast's rich natural resources while doing little for its indigenous people, most of whom are ethnically closer to nearby Myanmar and China than to the rest of India.
