To save Loe Sam, the army has destroyed it. The shops and homes of the 7,000 people who lived here are a heap of gray rubble, blown to bits by the army. Scraps of bedding and broken electric fans lie strewn in the dirt. As Pakistani Army helicopters and artillery fired at militants’ strongholds in the region, about 200,000 people fled to tent camps for the displaced in Pakistan, to relatives’ homes or across the border into Afghanistan.
(...) Arabs, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Afghans form the hard core of its opponents, enlisting young, unemployed local men who join the militants for money and the prestige of sitting armed with a rifle in a double-cabin pickup, the favored Taliban vehicle, General Khan said.
(...) “If the government doesn’t rebuild, we will be thieves, suicide bombers,” he said. “We will be forced to do these things.”
(...) The army says 1,500. But two officers, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were contradicting their superiors, said that the number appeared excessive. One army captain involved in the fighting said 300 seemed closer.
(...) In his wood-paneled office, Col. Nauman Saeed, the officer in charge of day-to-day operations at the headquarters in Khar, said he was mired in a classic guerrilla conflict. In September, he said, Taliban leaders in Bajaur had replenished their forces with 950 more men from Afghanistan. “You keep killing them,” Colonel Saeed said, “but you still have them around.”