Pakistan verifying reports of Taliban fighting in Syria

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan today said it was trying to verify media reports that the local Taliban has sent scores of militants to Syria to fight the security forces of embattled President Bashar al-Assad.

"We have seen these reports in the media and the concerned authorities are verifying these claims by the militants," Foreign Office spokesman Aizaz Chaudhry said.

Militants affiliated with the banned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, an umbrella organisation of over a dozen rebel groups, have claimed that some 120 fighters have been sent to Syria so far.

"So far, 100 fighters have reached Syria and 20 more are on the way. More volunteers are eager and ready to go," a militant source told PTI.

Earlier, Taliban commanders had said that only Arab fighters linked with Al Qaeda had relocated to Syria and other places to wage jihad against the enemies of Islam.

Some independent observers have expressed doubts about these claims, saying the Taliban are trying to exaggerate their potential to carry out operations overseas.

A senior journalist working for a private TV channel in Peshawar told PTI that the land route from Pakistan to Syria passes through Iran, and it was hardly likely that Tehran would allow Sunni rebels to cross over to topple a Shia ruler.

The claim by the Pakistani militants coincides with reports of an influx of hundreds of fighters from across world into Syria to remove the ruling Shia al-Assad regime.

The international media has reported that over 200 Jordanians crossed into Syria over the past month from Turkey, raising the total number of Jordanians fighting alongside Islamist rebels to more than 700.

Nour al-Din al-Halabi, a commander in the al-Nusra Front near Aleppo in northern Syria, claimed that over 1,200 foreign and Arab fighters had joined the group in the past three months.

According to the UN, over 93,000 people have been killed in the fighting since the start of the unrest in March 2011.