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MIRANSHAH, Pakistan: Thousands of Pakistani tribesmen offered funeral prayers on Wednesday as they buried 50 people killed in military air strikes after days of heavy clashes near the Afghan border, officials said.
Residents said the dead were civilians including women and children, but the army insisted that it had only killed pro-Taliban militants in Tuesday's attacks on Ippi village in North Waziristan.
At least 250 people, including 47 soldiers, have died in three days of some of the fiercest battles in the region since Pakistan joined the US-led "war on terror" in 2001 after the September 11 attacks.
The area has been identified by US and Pakistani officials as a stronghold of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, which has been blamed for the deadly 9/11 suicide attacks on US soil.
"Around 3,000 tribesmen gathered in Ippi village to offer funeral prayers for some 50 people who died in the air strikes," a local official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
There was relative calm in the area on Wednesday but thousands of people have fled the region and the army has enforced a curfew in nearby Mir Ali, the second largest town in North Waziristan.
Top military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad rejected claims of civilian deaths in the air strikes.
"The strikes were conducted on militant targets and 50 militants were killed," Arshad told AFP, adding that the rebels were using civilian homes to launch attacks on the security forces.
He said the military action was in response to insurgent attacks on army convoys.
The army says around 200 militants have been killed in fighting and air strikes since Sunday.
Residents in Ippi said they were pulling more bodies from the rubble of dozens of homes destroyed in the raids. They said around 12 bombs had landed on the village bazaar.
The village was the ancestral home of an Islamic firebrand tribal leader, the Fakir of Ippi, who fought British colonial forces and then Pakistani troops before his death in 1960.
The use of warplanes against militants who fled into the region after the fall of Afghanistan's Taliban regime six years ago is rare, with the army usually relying on helicopter gunships.
They come amid a wave of violence that has swept across Pakistan since government troops besieged and stormed the Al-Qaeda-linked Red Mosque in Islamabad in July, an operation in which around 100 people died.
Around 300 people had died in militant suicide attacks and bomb blasts prior to the clashes in North Waziristan, many of them soldiers.
Pro-Taliban militants are also holding more than 200 Pakistani soldiers in nearby South Waziristan district since abducting them in late August, saying they will be killed if the army does not stop operations in the area.
Three have been executed so far.
Musharraf still faces considerable public opposition to using Pakistan's armed forces on their own soil in what many people here regard as a US war.
About 90,000 troops are currently in the region.
- AFP/so
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