US strike kills nine in Pakistan tribal belt

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, (AFP)

A suspected US missile strike killed up to nine people in Pakistan’s northwest tribal belt on Thursday, where the military is poised to attack a feared Taliban commander, officials said.

The attack hit 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the main town of Wana in South Waziristan, where Washington says Al-Qaeda and Taliban rebels who fled after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan are hiding, plotting attacks on the West.

Officials said the latest in a string of strikes by unmanned drone aircraft near the Afghan border appeared to have targeted a training camp run by a local Taliban commander named Wali, also known by the alias Malang.

Local administration official Hamayun Khan told AFP that up to three drone aircraft were in the area, first firing two missiles killing two militants, then firing two more as the rebels gathered to recover the bodies.

“This target was a training camp and a portion in same building used as an office by Taliban commander Malang,” Khan said.

“We have a confirmed report of seven militants killed, but militants are still digging out the dead bodies.”

A military official said that nine suspected insurgents were killed in the strikes in the Shulam area of South Waziristan.

“Four of those killed were local militants and five were foreigners,” said the official who did not want to be named as he was not authorised to speak to the media. “It was not immediately clear if Wali was killed or not.”

The official said the foreigners were Arabs and Turkmenistan nationals, but could not confirm their identities.

The US military does not, as a rule, confirm drone attacks, but its armed forces and the Central Intelligence Agency operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy the unmanned drones in the region.

Pakistan’s military said Tuesday that the government had ordered an offensive into the tribal belt along the Afghan border to hunt down Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud and his network.

Targeted strikes have been reported in South Waziristan and other tribal regions, although a full-fledged offensive does not appear to have begun.

Pakistani troops are already fighting a more than seven-week battle to dislodge Taliban insurgents from three other northwest districts, and claim to have almost completed their mission in the scenic Swat valley.

But analysts have said the tribal areas present a far greater challenge, with Mehsud’s fighters — believed to number up to 20,000 — entrenched in the hostile mountain terrain and easily able to slip into hideouts in Afghanistan.

A senior US defence official said last week that any operation into South Waziristan would work best with “pressure on both sides of the border.”

About 90,000 foreign troops — most of them from the United States — are currently deployed in Afghanistan to battle an insurgency by the resurgent Taliban, which was ousted from government by the 2001 US-led invasion.

The United States administration, which has put Pakistan at the heart of its strategy to battle Al-Qaeda, has welcomed the Swat offensive, but the drone attacks are a source of tension between Washington and Islamabad.

Pakistan publicly opposes the strikes, saying they violate its territorial sovereignty and deepen resentment among the populace. Since August 2008, more than 40 such strikes have killed nearly 400 people.

Pakistan’s military said in a statement Thursday that they had killed 34 suspected Taliban fighters in the last 24 hours in Swat and Lower Dir districts, where the military launched its campaign in late April.

Security forces claim to have killed more than 1,500 suspected rebels since the operation began, although the toll is impossible to verify.