US missile strike targets village in Pakistan

By Peter Walker and agencies

Source : The Guardian

Monday October 27 2008

A missile believed to have been fired from a US drone aircraft has killed up to 20 people in Pakistan’s South Waziristan border region, Pakistani officials said today.

The strike targeted a house belonging to an aide to a local Taliban leader in what is thought to be a stronghold of Taliban and al-Qaida forces.

Up to 20 bodies were found at the scene, intelligence officials, quoting local sources, said.

The AFP news agency quoted other officials in the region as saying that 16 people had been killed. The report said Haji Omar Khan, an aide to the local Taliban leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, was among the dead.

There was no independent verification of the casualties, and US officials did not confirm any attack.

Drones operated by the US military and the CIA regularly patrol the skies above the largely lawless regions of Pakistan that border Afghanistan.

They have carried out more than a dozen reported missile strikes in the past few months, killing at least two senior al-Qaida officials but putting an increasing strain on Pakistan’s relations with Washington.

Pakistan still officially supports US-led efforts to hunt down al-Qaida and Taliban forces.

However, since Pervez Musharraf, a staunch US ally, stepped down as the president of Pakistan in August, the country’s new leaders have increasingly complained about drone-launched attacks.

Tensions have increased further with a series of US helicopter raids into Pakistani territory from Afghanistan, which Pakistani leaders have condemned as a violation of the country’s sovereignty.

In response, US commanders have alleged that Pakistani forces are not putting enough pressure on militant strongholds on their territory.

Afghanistan’s US-backed president, Hamid Karzai, has repeatedly accused Pakistan of secretly helping militants as a way to exert influence over its neighbour.

Yesterday, "the New York Times" reported that the US military had abandoned the use of helicopter-carried commando raids across the border into Pakistan.

The decision followed a raid on September 3 in which more than 20 people, some of them civilians, were killed, sparking a furious response from the Pakistani government.

US commanders have instead increased the frequency of missile strikes. There have been at least 18 such attacks since the start of August compared with five during the rest of 2008, the New York Times said.

Tribal leaders from Afghanistan and Pakistan were meeting in Islamabad today to try to find ways to end militant violence.

The Jirgagai, or mini-jirga, follows up on a bigger assembly in Kabul last year, and is likely to recommend the idea of talks with the Taliban, Reuters reported.

Also today, a car bomb explosion in the western Pakistani city of Quetta killed two people.

The bomb went off near government offices and the Iranian consulate, a police official said, adding that 10 other people had been injured.