SEEKING SHELTER: Residents fleeing a military offensive enter Dera Ismail Khan on Sunday. (Reuters)

PESHAWAR: Pakistan pounded Taleban bases from the air and bore down on their leader’s hometown Sunday, intensifying a major offensive against the militants and claiming to have killed 60 of them.

More than 100,000 people have fled South Waziristan, part of the tribal belt on the Afghan border that US officials call the most dangerous place on earth, staying with relatives or renting accommodation to escape the fighting.

Thousands of Al-Qaeda-linked fighters, heavily armed and well-trained, are holed up in the tribal belt, where the army says the offensive is concentrated on strongholds of the Tehrik-e-Taleban Pakistan.

On the second day of the offensive, Taleban armed with rockets and heavy weapons put up strong resistance at Sharwangi, an area of impenetrable forest high in the mountains, as fighter jets bombed positions, officials said.

“In the last 24 hours, reportedly 60 terrorists have been killed in operation Rah-e-Nijat,” the military said in a statement. “Casualties of security forces are five soldiers (dead) and 11 are injured.”

Ground forces launched the three-pronged push late Friday, starting a much-anticipated assault in a bid to crush networks blamed for some of the worst attacks that have killed more than 2,250 people over the past two years.

“The resistance is not as stiff as we were expecting, maybe because we are still moving and have not yet reached the strongholds of the Taleban like Kotkai, Makin, Ladha and Kanigurram,” one military official told AFP.

Jets carried out airstrikes on Sunday, backing up troops who encountered resistance on the ground, a military official said, adding five Taleban hideouts had been destroyed. Another official said the army captured the rebel-held village of Spinkair Raghzai, erecting a checkpoint en route to Kotkai, the hometown of Pakistani Taleban chief Hakimullah Mehsud. The Taleban made counterclaims. They said they have inflicted “heavy casualties” and pushed advancing soldiers back into their bases. “We know how to fight this war and defeat the enemy with the minimum loss of our men,” Taleban spokesman Azam Tariq told The Associated Press from an undisclosed location. “This is a war imposed on us, and we will defend our land until our last man and our last drop of blood. This is a war bound to end in the defeat of the Pakistan Army.”