DAMADOLA, Pakistan, 15 January 2006 — Pakistan yesterday condemned a purported CIA airstrike that officials said unsuccessfully targeted Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 man while killing at least 17 people in a village near the Afghan border.
In a strain on the US-Pakistan alliance in the war on terrorism, Pakistani frustrations appeared to be growing over a series of attacks along the frontier that have not been explained but are widely suspected of targeting militants.
Pakistan, which has tens of thousands of its own forces hunting Al-Qaeda militants, says it won’t let any US forces in Afghanistan cross the border in pursuit of terror suspects or open fire into Pakistan. The Foreign Ministry protested to US Ambassador Ryan Crocker over what it described as the “loss of innocent civilian lives” in Friday’s strike in the northwestern tribal region of Bajur. Thousands of tribesmen staged angry street demonstrations in the area yesterday and a mob set fire to the office of a US-backed aid agency.
The US government has yet to comment on reports carried by US networks and confirmed by Pakistani officials that a CIA-operated Predator drone aircraft had launched missiles targeting Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden’s top lieutenant, at a residential compound in the village of Damadola.
Two senior Pakistani officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity, told The Associated Press that Pakistan’s own assessment was that the CIA had acted on incorrect information.
A senior intelligence official said that Pakistani agents had been informed by the CIA, but only after the strike. A senior government official said Al-Zawahiri “was not there.” A Foreign Ministry statement, however, acknowledged that preliminary investigations indicated there was a “foreign presence” in the area — which it said had most likely been targeted from across the border in Afghanistan.
Like Bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri is believed to have been hiding along the rugged Pakistan-Afghan frontier since the US-led ouster of the Taleban regime in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The Egyptian radical has a $25 million US government bounty on his head and has increasingly emerged as the terror network’s public face as Al-Qaeda’s supreme leader has maintained a public silence for over a year.
Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has won plaudits in the West for efforts in cracking down on Al-Qaeda, but he faces heavy domestic criticism for his ties with the United States, which will only deepen after Friday’s attack.
It’s the latest of three purported US missile or airstrikes that have struck Pakistani soil in under two months — raising questions about whether the Islamic country’s sovereignty has been compromised in the war on terror.
Last Saturday, US helicopters reportedly attacked a house in the North Waziristan tribal region, killing eight people. Two days later, Pakistan lodged a protest with the US military in Afghanistan.
In December, a senior Egyptian Al-Qaeda suspect, Hamza Rabia, was killed in what appeared to be a missile strike, also in North Waziristan — although Pakistan’s government maintained Rabia died in a bomb-making accident. In the government’s strongest statement to date, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed described Friday’s attack as “highly condemnable” and said it wanted “to assure the people we will not allow such incidents to reoccur.”
