Pakistani troops have retaken the largest town in the Swat valley from the Taliban, the army said today.
Government forces had full control of Mingora, although they were still meeting pockets of resistance from fighters on the outskirts of the town, said a spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas.
Many militants had fled Mingora instead of confronting troops in a final battle, he said, despite the military claiming earlier that escape routes had been closed.
"They had prepared Mingora city ... with bunkers, but when they realised that they were being encircled and the noose was tightening they decided not to give a pitched battle," Abbas said.
The military launched the offensive one month ago to oust Taliban militants who were extending their control over Pakistan's north-western region, near the border with Afghanistan. Government troops had been advancing steadily into the Swat valley, fighting house-to-house with Taliban gunmen, and towns have been bombarded from the air.
Pakistan's information minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, said the number of people uprooted from their homes by the fighting had reached "around 3 million," and that more than 190,000 of them were living in refugee camps. The rest were staying with relatives or relying on goodwill from local residents.
The exodus has raised fears of a humanitarian crisis, and the widespread domestic support the campaign has enjoyed so far could sour if the government is perceived to have failed the refugees or if a high number of civilian casualties is revealed.
Abbas said 1,217 militants had been killed in the Swat offensive and 79 arrested, and 81 soldiers had died. The military has not released figures on civilian casualties and has said all care has been taken to minimise them. The prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, today defended the offensive, saying it was necessary because the Taliban had challenged the authority of the government by advancing from its stronghold of Swat to the neighboring district of Buner, 60 miles (100km) from the capital, Islamabad.
"The very existence of Pakistan was at stake, we had to start the operation," Gilani told a group of workers at the state-owned Pakistan Television. He promised cash payments to people forced from their homes, and a massive reconstruction effort.
The military campaign has been backed by Washington and other western allies, who see it as a test of Islamabad's resolve to fight extremism.
The Taliban has warned it will launch terrorist strikes in Pakistani cities in retaliation for the campaign, and claimed responsibility for a gun and suicide bomb attack on Wednesday in the eastern city of Lahore that killed at least 30 people. A day later, three suicide bombings killed at least 14 people in two cities in the north-west.