Suicider kills two Pakistani soldiers in Waziristan

MIRANSHAH, Pakistan, July 17 (Reuters) A suicide bomber killed two Pakistani soldiers in the North Waziristan region on the Afghan border today, hours after pro-Taliban militants vowed to launch attacks on security forces.

The attack on a checkpost was the latest in a wave of violence in Pakistan's northwest in which 100 people, most of them police and troops, have been killed in the past two weeks.

Much of the violence is believed to be aimed at avenging a commando assault on a radical mosque in the capital last week, when 75 militant supporters of hardline clerics were killed.

Complicating government efforts to maintain security is a decision announced by pro-Taliban militants in North Waziristan on Sunday to scrap a 10-month-old peace deal.

The government is trying to save the pact even though critics, including some US officials, said it gave Taliban and al Qaeda militants a free hand to plot attacks in Afghanistan and beyond.

The militants said they were pulling out of the deal after accusing the government of violating it by deploying more troops in North Waziristan and launching attacks.

''We will launch guerrilla attacks on the security forces,'' militant spokesman Abdullah Farhad said by telephone late on Monday from an undisclosed location.

Residents said militants blew up two police checkpoints on the outskirts of North Waziristan's main town of Miranshah on Monday night but caused no casualties.

Today, a suicide bomber leapt from the roof of a vehicle as it stopped at a checkpost and blew himself up, killing two soldiers and wounding four, a military spokesman said.

The North Waziristan militants are demanding the removal of army checkposts and the payment of compensation for losses incurred during fighting in 2005 and 2006.

Farhad said the militants would not attack army checkposts in built-up areas to avoid civilian casualties but would only open talks if their demands were met.

The pact, signed in September, was aimed at stopping cross-border militant raids into Afghanistan and attacks on Pakistani security forces.

TRYING TO TALK Grappling with a wave of attacks in the northwest, the government is trying to salvage a deal that did lead to a sharp fall in attacks on security forces in North Waziristan, after hundreds of people had been killed there.

Ali Mohammad Jan Orakzai, the governor of North West Frontier Province and the architect of the pact, had sent a delegation of tribal elders and clerics to talk to the militants.

''The delegation is trying to establish contacts with the Taliban,'' a provincial official said.

Thousands of Taliban and al Qaeda militants fled to North Waziristan and other lawless Pakistani border regions after US-backed forces defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001.

Pakistan said the pact would empower leaders of ethnic Pashtun tribes and isolate foreign militants sheltering among them. But US military officials said it failed to stop raids from North Waziristan into Afghanistan.

The US president's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said on Sunday the North Waziristan pact had not worked and the United States was fully backing a Pakistani crackdown on al Qaeda and Taliban activity and wanted Pakistan to do more.

''There is pooling of Taliban there. There is training, and there are operations,'' Hadley said on Fox News.

REUTERS SKB KP1658