Pakistan will reopen a main supply route to Western forces in Afghanistan on Monday, a week after militants hijacked more than a dozen trucks on the road through the Khyber Pass, a senior official said on Sunday. Most supplies, including fuel, for US and Nato forces in landlocked Afghanistan are trucked through Pakistan, much of it through the fabled pass that lies between Peshawar and the border town of Torkham. Authorities in the tribal region of Khyber blocked the main road from Peshawar through the pass to the border at Torkham soon after militants hijacked 13 trucks laden with Western military supplies on November 10. A senior government administrator in Khyber, one of seven semi-autonomous tribal regions, said that truck convoys would start rolling again with armed escorts. "Now they will be escorted by security personnel and vehicles," Fida Mohammad Bangash, the deputy political agent for Khyber, said. People in Jamrud, the main commercial hub in the Khyber Pass, say militants move freely in the area, and drive through on pick-up trucks half-an-hour before prayers, ordering shopkeepers to close and escorting them to mosques. "We have virtually become hostage in the hands of Taliban. There is no security," Mohammad Shafiq, a Khyber resident, said, adding that militants controlled a corridor of 15 km (9 miles) either side of the road, and went virtually unchallenged by paramilitary troops stationed in the area. Transport operators say the government had neglected the security along the road. About two dozen trucks and oil-tankers have been attacked in the past month. "If the government wanted to clear the road and open, it could do it within a day," said Mohammad Shafiq, a transport company owner. "We don't know why they're not taking action." "Either they are scared of these militants or they are their own men," said Haji Omer, a transporter, complaining bitterly over the money he loses with every day the road is blocked.