By Biswajyoti Das DINJAN, India, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Thousands of combat troops fanned out on Thursday in the mountains and jungles of India's restive northeast to hunt down separatist rebels, blamed for killing dozens of migrant workers in the past week. The crackdown, which started on midnight on Wednesday, was spread across Assam and two other northeastern states, and aimed at catching or killing rebels of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and destroying their training camps. "Intensified operations against militants and extensive area domination by our troops in the region have begun," said Major-General N.C. Marwah, a senior military commander at Dinjan, 570 km (360 miles) east of the region's biggest city Guwahati. Authorities say militants belonging to the ULFA, which is fighting for the liberation of tea- and oil-rich Assam, are responsible for killing 72 people since Friday, nearly all of them Hindi-speaking migrants from eastern India. Dozens have been wounded in the attacks, the worst strikes by rebels in the state since 2003. The attacks sparked panic among Hindi-speaking people, causing thousands to flee the state in packed buses and trains. The rebel group, one of the more than half-a-dozen major insurgent outfits in India's isolated northeast, has not admitted responsibility for the killings. The group accuses New Delhi of exploiting Assam's resources while doing little to develop the state, and flooding it with non-Assamese people. On Thursday, troops in battle fatigue, some wearing black bandanas, moved throughout Assam as well as neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya. Some moved on foot while others patrolled roads in armoured vehicles fitted with machine guns. Security officials say the ULFA has hideouts in mountainous Arunachal Pradesh and over the border in Myanmar. The army and border guards will also try to choke off ULFA's supply of arms through Meghalaya from neighbouring Bangladesh. Army officers on the ground say that the gloves are off. "If they are on the killing spree, we cannot sit idle. We also have to go on a killing spree," said a local military commander directing troops against ULFA. In September, the group walked out of peace talks with New Delhi after the government called off a truce, saying the rebels had violated it. The recent attacks are a message that the ULFA is still a force to be reckoned with and will only talk on its own terms, security analysts say. The army says it has killed 15 insurgents and caught 32 since the peace talks ended. More than 20,000 people have been killed in the ULFA rebellion since 1979.
