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ISLAMABAD (AP) — The Pakistani army Sunday launched a long-awaited operation against foreign and local militants in a tribal region near the Afghan border, hours after jets pounded insurgent hideouts in the country's northwest, the army said.

The move effectively ends the government's policy of trying to negotiate with Pakistani Taliban militants instead of using force to end the years of fighting that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and security forces. It comes a week after the militants laid siege to the country's largest airport in an attack that shocked the country.

The North Waziristan tribal area, where the operation is targeted, is one of the last areas in the tribal regions where the military has not launched a large operation. Militant groups including the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaida and the Haqqani network have long used the region as a base from which to attack both Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan.

"Using North Waziristan as a base, these terrorists had waged a war against the state of Pakistan," military spokesman Gen. Asim Saleem Bajwa said in a press release announcing the operation.

The U.S. has pushed Pakistan to clear out militants in North Waziristan because they often use it as a sanctuary from which to attack NATO and Afghan troops. But Pakistan has said its troops were already too spread out across the northwest, and the military has also wanted political support from the civilian government to carry out an operation which will likely spark a bloody backlash across the country.

On Sunday night, the defense minister aggressively supported the operation, but there were no comments from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

"Now we have to fight this do or die war," Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif told Pakistan's Dunya Television. "We will fight it till the end."

There was no immediate information on how many troops were involved. The military said troops had been deployed along the borders to prevent militants from escaping, and within North Waziristan troops had cordoned off areas including the largest cities of Mir Ali and Miranshah.

Refugee camps have been established, the local population is being told to approach designated areas so they can be evacuated and surrender points have been established at which militants can give up their weapons, the military said. They also asked Afghanistan to secure its side of the border.

Exactly a week ago, ten militants and 26 people died when militants attacked the Karachi airport. The airport attack, against a transportation hub vital to the country's economy, shocked Pakistanis, and appeared to mark a turning point.

Pakistan has been criticized for fighting some militants such as the Pakistani Taliban which attacks the state but maintaining links with other militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban or the Haqqani network that they feel help them maintain influence in Afghanistan.

A key question surrounding this operation will be whether it targets all the fighters equally, said Ayesha Siddiqa, author of "Military Inc." about the Pakistani military. She also said that just focusing on North Waziristan ignores the wider problem of militants in the rest of the country.

"This is going half way, and not the full way," she said.

Pakistan already has a sizeable military presence in North Waziristan, an estimated 28,000 to 30,000 troops, said defense analyst Zahid Hussain, whose book "The Scorpion's Tale" plots the rise of militancy in Pakistan.

Hussain said militants had been using North Waziristan essentially as a training base. This operation will establish the military's control across the territory and make it more difficult for militants to freely operate there. But, he warned, it won't be easy, and it will likely spark reprisals.

"It is going to be a long drawn-out war. It is not going to end soon," he said.

Even before the announcement, Pakistani jets early Sunday pounded insurgent hideouts in North Waziristan, targeting militants who carried out the Karachi airport siege, officials said. The military said 105 militants were killed in the strikes.

"There were confirmed reports of presence of foreign and local terrorists in these hideouts who were linked in planning the Karachi airport attack," the military said.

One of those killed was Abu Abdul Rehman al-Maani, believed to have helped orchestrate the airport siege, two intelligence officials said. They did not want to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

The area where the strikes occurred is remote and dangerous for journalists, making it difficult to independently verify the accounts.

Residents in North Waziristan said they were woken up after midnight to the sound of jets roaring overhead but said the strikes happened in a remote, mountainous area.

"All the family members gathered in the yard in fear," said one local resident, Tawab Khan, from the village of Boyapul, about eight kilometers (five miles) from where the airstrikes hit. "We could hear big bangs but they didn't come from very close to our area."

Already tens of thousands of residents of North Waziristan have fled the region due to earlier military airstrikes and out of fear of more. News of the operation will likely increase the exodus.

The military said most of the dead in the Sunday strikes were Uzbeks. Uzbek militants have long based themselves in Pakistan's northwestern tribal areas.

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, along with the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the airport attack in what was a rare instance of the group striking within Pakistan. The militant group was formed in 1991 to overthrow the Uzbek government and install an Islamic caliphate there but later expanded that goal to include all of Central Asia. The organization has attacked U.S. and NATO targets in Afghanistan.

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Associated Press writers Riaz Khan in Peshawar and Zarar Khan in Islamabad contributed to this report.

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BAGHDAD (AP) — Emboldened by a call to arms by the top Shiite cleric, Iranian-backed militias have moved quickly to the center of Iraq's political landscape, spearheading what its Shiite majority sees as a fight for survival against Sunni militants who control of large swaths of territory north of Baghdad.

The emergence of the militias as a legitimate force enjoying the support of the Shiite-led government and the blessing of the religious establishment poses a threat to Iraq's unity, planting the seed for new sectarian strife and taking the regional Shiite-Sunni divide to a potentially explosive level.

Iraq's Shiite militias attacked U.S. forces during the eight-year American presence in the country. They also were in the lead in the Sunni-Shiite killings of 2006-07, pushing Iraq to the brink of civil war. Their death squads targeted radical Sunnis and they orchestrated the cleansing of Sunnis from several Baghdad neighborhoods.

More recently, Shiite militias have been battling alongside the forces of President Bashar Assad and Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah against mostly Sunni rebels and militants in neighboring Syria. Some of them have returned home to Iraq — first to fight Sunni militants in Anbar province, and now on Baghdad's northern fringes and in Salahuddin and Ninevah provinces.

Those are the areas where the Sunni militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, captured cities and towns in a lightning offensive last week. Among their gains were Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, and Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein.

Security officials said Shiite militiamen have been fighting for months on the government's side against ISIL fighters in areas west of Baghdad in mainly Sunni Anbar province as well as parts of Diyala province northeast of the capital. They also have been fighting Sunni militants south of Baghdad. Their involvement, however, has never been publicly acknowledged by the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Their enhanced role in the fight against the Sunni militants will deepen Iran's influence in Iraq, giving the non-Arab and mostly Shiite country a role similar to the one it plays in Syria. Tehran has thrown its weight behind Assad's government in his struggle against mostly Sunni rebels and militants from al-Qaida-inspired or linked groups.

Shiite militiamen interviewed by The Associated Press in the past two days talk of undergoing training in Iran and then being flown to Syria to fight on the government's side. Once there, they say they are met by Iranian operatives who give them weapons and their assignment.

The militiamen, interviewed separately, paint a picture of their groups as being inspired by what they call a "grave" threat to their community. They say they have been motivated by the call to arms by their most revered cleric, the Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Ominously, they don't see the ISIL as their sole enemy; they also list Iraqi Sunnis whom they accuse of supporting the al-Qaida-inspired group in areas now under the militants' control.

Their comments also suggest a high level of acquiescence by al-Maliki's Shiite-led government. Six years ago, the government battled the Shiite militias in Basra to establish his authority and project his image as a national leader.

Now, al-Maliki publicly meets with militia leaders, like Qais al-Khazali of the Iranian-backed Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or League of the Righteous, a group that staged some spectacular attacks against U.S. troops before their withdrawal in 2011.

Hadi al-Amiri, a Shiite Cabinet minister who once led the Badr Brigade militia, created by Iran and trained by its Revolutionary Guard in the 1980s, is now a close ally of al-Maliki and personally directs battles against militants in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, where he won a parliament seat in April elections.

After years of repeated assurances that the Badr Brigade had ceased to exist as a militia, bearded men in military uniform bearing its insignia appeared on state-run TV last week, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with army troops.

The militiamen and their leaders offer a glimpse of what may be in store following the fighters' public empowerment.

"Anyone who supports or sympathizes with the ISIL is a terrorist," Abu Wareth al-Moussawi, a spokesman for the Iraqi al-Nugabaa militia, told the AP from Iran. "We will never allow ISIL to control Iraq, and we will target anyone who supports it."

Jassim al-Jazaeri, a senior leader of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah Brigades, a Shiite militia based in southern Iraq, blames the loss of territory in the north partially on Sunni political leaders. "We know that ISIL has a base of support in Mosul," he said.

Since al-Sistani made his call to arms Friday through a representative, Shiite militias have flexed their muscles on the streets of Baghdad and in cities across the mostly Shiite south, including Basra. There were parades of pickup trucks carrying armed fighters chanting Shiite slogans and vowing to crush the ISIL.

Radical and anti-American Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi army fought some street battles against the Americans, has called for parades of Shiite militiamen across Iraq next weekend, evidence of their empowerment.

"The defense of Iraq and its people and holy sites is a duty on every citizen who can carry arms and fight terrorists," said al-Sistani's representative, Sheik Abdul-Mahdi al-Karbalaie, in a Friday sermon. "They must volunteer in the security forces for this holy cause."

His call quickly resonated with Shiites, who wait on every word from al-Sistani or his representatives. It was instantly used by the militias to tout their legitimacy and flex their muscle on the streets.

Authorities looked the other way while the militiamen paraded on the streets since Friday, but the shows of strength prompted al-Sistani's office to issue a clarification late Saturday, warning against "any behavior that has a sectarian or a nationalist character that may harm the cohesion of the Iraqi people."

It also called for a halt to armed displays "outside legal frameworks" in mixed Shiite-Sunni area, urging authorities to take measures to stop them.

The words from al-Sistani's representative on Friday, warning that the Sunni militants would not stop until they reach Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf — home to some of the most revered Shiite shrines — provided the militias with religious cover. The protection of shrines was also the rallying cry of Iraqi Shite militiamen who traveled to Syria to fight Sunni rebels.

"I fight for my faith, country and holy sites," said Ayad al-Rubaei, a 23-year-old Asaib Ahl al-haq militiaman and veteran of the Syrian civil war.

"It is martyrdom that I seek, and I want it today, not tomorrow," al-Rubaei told the AP by phone from Anbar province as heavy gunfire rang out in the background.

Prominent Sunni lawmaker Salim al-Jubouri told the AP that the shows of force by the Shiite militias and their proliferation "will pose a grave danger to Iraq in the future and threaten an armed conflict."

"We say 'no' to the ISIL and 'no' to the militias," he said.

In a region torn apart by violence, a leader who promises security above all else can be appealing. Three years after the chaos of the Arab Spring, these strongmen types are rising again in the Middle East.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is one of them, though he has yet to overcome the disaster now unfolding in Iraq. Iraqi lawyer Zaid al-Ali tells NPR's Arun Rath that Maliki is partly to blame for the crisis.

"His control over the security sector has been a disaster," says Ali, an expert on constitutional law in the Middle East.

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Afghans chose between two former government ministers in a presidential election that will be the first transfer of power by ballot in Afghanistan's history.

The winner of Saturday's balloting, as Arab News puts it, "will inherit an unfinished war and an economy in the doldrums."

Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist and former foreign minister, is the presumptive frontrunner, earning 45 percent of the vote in April's first round of voting.

Former finance minister and World Bank official Ashraf Ghani, who earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University, is the only other name on the ballot. Ghani held 32 percent of the vote in April.

Parallels

In A First, Afghanistan Is Set To Change Leaders At The Ballot Box