Pakistani troops killed at least 34 militants after about 150 Taliban attacked a military checkpost in the northwest on Friday, challenging government assertions crackdowns have weakened the group.
Homegrown Taliban rebels are seeking to topple the U.S.-backed government of unpopular President Asif Ali Zardari, who has been pressured to hand over some of his key powers, such as dissolving parliament and appointing military chiefs.
A senior military officer and four paramilitary soldiers were also killed in the attack in Orakzai, a day after Pakistani jets killed nearly 50 people, mostly militants, in strikes on a school and a seminary in the same region, a government official said.
Fourteen soldiers were wounded in the Taliban assault.
Pakistani jets also bombed Taliban-linked madrasas.
Pakistani jets pounded suspected Taliban positions in a one-two punch on Thursday that killed nearly 50 people, most of them militants, in a restive tribal region in the northwest, officials said.
The two attacks targeted a school used by the Taliban as well as a madrasa or Islamic seminary in the Mamuzai area of the Orakzai Agency, an ethnic Pashtun tribal region where many militants fled to escape an army offensive further south.
"Twenty-five bodies of militants have been recovered from the school," Asghar Khan, a government official, told Reuters by telephone from Kalaya, the main town of Orakzai.
He said 13 militants were killed in the madrasa.
By: Brant
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