Militant attacks have killed nearly 3,300 people since July 2007 across Pakistan.Pakistani troops have been pursuing an anti-Taliban offensive since late March
Army helicopter gunships pounded insurgent hideouts in northwest Pakistan on Sunday, killing at least 22 militants, a government official said.
Samiullah Khan said the hideouts hit were in the Dabori area and its neighboring villages of the Orakzai tribal region near the Afghan border. He added the aerial strikes also destroyed six militant compounds.
Khan said the militants fired mortars at an army checkpoint in Mishti Mela area in Lower Orakzai, wounding two soldiers.
Pakistani forces launched an operation in Orakzai in mid-March to flush out militants who last year fled an army offensive in South Waziristan. The troops are believed to have retaken several areas from the Taliban in the region.
Thousands of people have fled the area. Most of them have moved in with relatives in nearby districts.
Independent confirmation of the casualties and the identities of those killed is virtually impossible because the region is remote and dangerous and media access there is restricted.
The tribal region is the primary base of Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud.
Mehsud was believed killed in a mid-January suspected U.S. missile strike, but intelligence officials now say he is thought to have survived.
The Taliban had always denied the strike killed Mehsud, though failed to offer any evidence such as video footage of him.
Pakistani jets bombed suspected militant hideouts in a lawless tribal region near the Afghan border on Sunday, killing at least 13 rebels, officials said.
Three jet fighters participated in the attack and destroyed four insurgent hideouts in Orakzai tribal district, where Pakistani troops have been pursuing an anti-Taliban offensive since late March, a military spokesman told AFP.
"Jets targeted militants in Dabori, Ghiljo and Khadizai towns," he said.
Local administration official Sajjad Ahmed confirmed the casualty numbers and said eight Taliban wounded in the air strikes had been captured.
The toll might rise as other suspected hideouts were also pounded, he added.
Orakzai is the latest district in northwest Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal area to have witnessed an anti-Taliban operation by the military, following US pressure to eradicate Islamist extremism.
Independent confirmation of Sunday's casualties was impossible as the area is a closed military zone inaccessible to aid workers and journalists.
Security forces launched the Orakzai offensive on March 24 in an effort to flush out Taliban fighters who escaped a major assault on South Waziristan last year.
Washington says Pakistan's tribal belt is a stronghold for Al-Qaeda-linked militants plotting attacks on US-led troops fighting a nearly nine-year insurgency in Afghanistan.
In the Bajaur tribal region further north, security forces Sunday shot dead a suspected suicide bomber before he could detonate his suicide vest near a military convoy, the military spokesman said.
Suicide and bomb attacks have killed nearly 3,300 people since July 2007 across nuclear-armed Pakistan. The attacks are blamed on Al-Qaeda, Taliban and other extremist Islamist groups.
In a separate incident, Taliban militants blew up two state-run schools for boys near Khar, the main town in Bajaur, local administration official Adalat Khan told AFP.
The attackers overpowered the guards and blew up the schools overnight, Khan said, adding that no casualties had been reported.
Islamist militants have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in northwest Pakistan in recent years.
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