Bomb kills 2 soldiers in NW Pakistan: paramilitary

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) - – A roadside bomb killed two Pakistani soldiers on Sunday and wounded two others in a northwest tribal region hit by a fresh wave of Islamist unrest, a paramilitary spokesman said.

The device exploded in Safi town in Mohmand tribal district, which borders Bajaur district, where a suicide bomber blew himself up at a military checkpoint on Saturday, killing 16 people, including two soldiers.

"The remote-controlled bomb was buried in Safi town -- two security men were martyred and two injured in this incident," Major Fazal-ur-Rehman, spokesman for the paramilitary Frontier Corps, said of Sunday's bombing.

Residents in the area told AFP the soldiers were in a water tanker, which was also badly damaged when it struck the improvised explosive device.

Bajaur and Mohmand sit at the northern tip of Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt running along the Afghan border, and have seen increasing unrest in recent weeks as security forces try to dismantle Taliban sanctuaries.

The military first launched operations against Islamist fighters in Mohmand and Bajaur in August 2008 and have claimed several times to have quashed the militant threat, but clashes and attacks continue.

Pakistan's northwest tribal belt has become a stronghold for both homegrown Islamist militant groups and hundreds of extremists who fled Afghanistan after the US-led invasion toppled the hardline Taliban regime in late 2001.

Pakistan's military last year embarked on multiple new assaults into Taliban strongholds in the northwest, and helicopter gunships last week launched a fierce assault on suspected military hideouts in Bajaur.

Also Sunday, militants blew up a government-run girls' primary school on the outskirts of northwest garrison town Bannu.

"The school is almost completely destroyed," said Mohammad Hussain Khan, a local police official in the area. "They planted explosives around the walls and then dynamited the building."

Islamist militants opposed to co-education have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in the northwest of the country in recent years as they wage a fierce insurgency to enforce sharia law.