20 pro-Taliban militants were killed and five Pakistani troops injured during separate gun battles in North Waziristan tribal agency, where the army is engaged in containing spiralling attacks on security forces in an apparent retaliation for the Lal Masjid crackdown.

After militants launched attacks on army posts and tried to blow up an army convoy, the military pressed helicopter gun ships to bombard their hideouts in the area, for the first time in recent months.

Defence spokesman Maj Gen Waheed Arshad told the media the helicopters were attacking the militant positions after a gunfight broke out between troops and militants in Mirnashah, the headquarters of North Waziristan, following an attempt by ultras to blow up an army convoy with improvised explosives.

He said seven militants were killed and five army men injured in the fighting that ensued as troops engaged the militants from different sides.

Arshad said 13 militants were killed and seven captured Saturday night when they tried to attack "three to four" check posts manned by paramilitary forces.

"Security forces, who were ready for these attacks, retaliated, in which 13 militants were killed and seven have been arrested with their arms and ammunition," he said.    

This is perhaps the first major success by the beleaguered Pakistani troops which began moving into the tribal area amid a spate of suicide bomb attacks since the July 11 military raid on Lal Masjid.

While 103 people were killed in the Lal Masjid raid, over 150 others, mostly security personnel, were killed in the subsequent suicide attacks on tribal areas, Islamabad and a convoy of Chinese engineers in Hub town in Balochistan.

The fresh attacks by militants came as a jirga, or council of elders, consisting of 45 members, concluded their three-day meeting at Datakhel in Wazirisan to revive the last year's peace deal with the government with was abrogated by the militants after the Lal Masjid operation.

The jirga members who reportedly held talks with the representatives of Pak Taliban representatives would meet NWFP Governor Gen (retd) Ali Muhammad Jan Aurakzai tomorrow in Peshawar and discuss the future course of action, the political agent of the province was quoted by PTV as saying.

The jirga temporarily halted its meeting yesterday when militants fired rockets at a building near where the talks were being held.

The council met even as US President George W Bush termed the last year's accord as a failure.

"Last September, President (Pervez) Musharraf of Pakistan reached an agreement that gave tribal leaders more responsibility for policing their own areas. Unfortunately, tribal leaders were unwilling to and unable to go after al Qaeda or the Taliban," he said in his weekly radio address.

Referring to the latest US National Intelligence Estimate, Bush also expressed his concern, saying "one of the most troubling is its assessment that al Qaeda has managed to establish a haven in the tribal areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan".