ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani soldiers were fighting intense street battles on Wednesday as they pushed into a major Taliban base in the militants' South Waziristan stronghold, the military said.
The army launched an offensive on October 17 aimed at rooting out and defeating Pakistani Taliban militants in the lawless ethnic Pashtun region on the Afghan border.
Fighting has intensified in recent days after security forces zeroed in on three main militant bases -- Sararogha, Makeen and Ladha -- in their three-pronged offensive.
Soldiers had captured a "major part" of Sararogha and had also stormed into Ladha, the military said.
"Security forces entered into the important stronghold of terrorists, the town of Ladha. Intense fighting is taking place in the streets," the military said in a statement.
South Waziristan' rugged landscape of barren mountains and hidden ravines has become a global center of Islamist militancy and many foreign al Qaeda fighters are believed to be based there, along with thousands of Pakistani insurgents.
The militants are being squeezed out of their strongholds but have retaliated by stepping up bomb attacks on urban targets.
Security officials say the militants' "command and control structure" is in the three bases and they expect stiff resistance from Taliban defenders.
The army said at the weekend that government forces had converged on Makeen from three directions.
BOMB ATTACKS
The fall of the bases would be a major setback for the Taliban but security analysts say the militants could step up attacks in towns and cities to put pressure on the government and try to sap its resolve.
More than 100 people, most of them women, were killed in a car-bomb attack in a market in the northwestern city of Peshawar last week, the deadliest attack in the country in two years.
Thirty-five people were killed in a suicide attack bomb outside a bank in the city of Rawalpindi on Monday.
