Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Pakistan's army said it took control of the Swat Valley near Afghanistan after a three-month operation against pro-Taliban Islamic fighters.

``Troops have pushed out the miscreants from the Swat Valley to an adjoining isolated area'' in the mountains, Major General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the director-general of military operations, said at a briefing yesterday, according to the official Associated Press of Pakistan.

Thirty-six soldiers and nine civilians were killed during the offensives, the general said, without saying how many militants died. More than 615 people were arrested, 100 of whom are still being detained, he added.

Terrorist attacks and suicide bombings increased in Pakistan, including in the northwest tribal region bordering Afghanistan, after the army raided the Red Mosque in the capital, Islamabad, in July to end a standoff with clerics. The Swat operation targeted supporters of Maulana Fazlullah, a cleric seeking to impose Islamic law in the once popular tourist destination about 250 kilometers (150 miles) from the city.

At least 10 of Fazlullah's allies were killed, Pasha said, according to APP. Fazlullah remains at large. As many as 230 militants were killed in a two-week operation between November and December, the army said last month.

The cleric's followers took over police stations and controlled the civil administration, Pasha said. A resurgence of the militants will be prevented if people withdraw their support and stop donating money to the fighters. The government will also have to strengthen the police and local authority in order to maintain law and order, he added.

Tribal Regions

Pakistan has deployed more than 100,000 soldiers in the tribal region bordering Afghanistan to combat Taliban and al- Qaeda terrorists crossing the frontier, President Pervez Musharraf said Dec. 26 during a visit to Islamabad by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The U.S. said in an intelligence report in July last year that al-Qaeda established a base in the tribal region to carry out attacks on coalition forces inside Afghanistan.

Musharraf has said al-Qaeda-linked Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was behind the suicide bombing and gunfire that killed opposition leader Benazir Bhutto at an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, on Dec. 27.

Pakistan's military on Jan. 4 bombed Mehsud's suspected hideout in the South Waziristan tribal region, Dawn newspaper reported at the time. Mehsud is still hiding in the area and there are reports he is ill, APP cited Pasha as saying at the briefing.

Fort Attacked

Mehsud leads an alliance of about five pro-Taliban groups, formed last December and known as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, according to a report by the Combating Terrorism Center of the U.S. military academy at West Point.

The TTP has a 40-member leadership council and includes representatives from the seven agencies within the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, according to an article in the center's journal CTC Sentinel published for January.

Mehsud has been operating for several years in command of as many as 5,000 fighters, according to the article.

Security forces yesterday killed 40 militants in a battle for control of a fort in South Waziristan, Pakistan's military said. Seven members of the Frontier Corps were killed and 15 escaped, while 20 others are missing, it said.

About 200 militants attacked the army-managed Sararogha Fort by blowing up a wall, the military said in a statement.

Intelligence Unit

Pakistan yesterday rejected a Jan. 15 report in the New York Times newspaper that the Inter-Service Intelligence unit lost control of militant groups it trained for operations in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

The ISI was forced to expel dozens of officers who trained such militants because they came to sympathize with their students' views, the newspaper said, citing an unidentified former agency official.

When Musharraf allied Pakistan with the Bush administration in its war against terrorism in 2001, the ISI couldn't rein in militants it had nurtured for decades, according to the report. Pakistan supported Afghanistan's Taliban regime until the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S.

The New York Times report is part of propaganda initiated against Pakistan, APP cited an unidentified spokesman for the Office of the Inter-Services Public Relations as saying.

To contact the reporters on this story: Paul Tighe in Sydney at ptighe@bloomberg.net; Khalid Qayum in Islamabad at kqayum@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: January 16, 2008 21:28 EST