ISLAMABAD, 17 January 2007 — The Pakistan Army launched an airstrike on a suspected Al-Qaeda training camp yesterday following a tip-off about the presence of militants there, Pakistani officials and witnesses said. The attack killed 20 militants at the camp close to the Afghan border.
Pakistan Army spokesman and the Director General of the Inter-Services Public Relations said: “The operation was carried out at around 6:55 a.m. (0155 GMT) in Zamzola in South Waziristan, based on information that 25 to 30 miscreants, including foreigners were present there.” Sultan said there was a precision airstrike, and helicopter gunships mopped up. No ground troops were used. A military statement later said three out of a cluster of five mud-walled compounds housing the militants were destroyed.
“I can’t tell you the exact number of casualties, but most of them were killed,” Sultan said. The attack came hours after US Defense Secretary Robert Gates arrived in Kabul for talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
A resident of Zamzola raised the possibility that US drone aircraft helped identify the target in the forested mountains, 60 km north of Wana.
“It is a small forest where the bombing took place. We noticed a drone hovering early in the morning and then a few helicopters came and bombed three houses there,” villager Mohammad Ali told Reuters.
A Reuters reporter in North Waziristan saw seven helicopters including at least two US-built Cobras leave from Tochi Fort’s helipad in Miranshah less than an hour before the attack and returned shortly after.
An intelligence official in Wana said 10 bodies had been found at the attack site, two of them appeared to be local men but the others were too badly damaged to identify.
Haji Pazir Gul, a journalist and a notable of the area where the airstrike took place, told Arab News on telephone: “Local people, mainly tribesmen, were pulling out bodies from the debris because the army had not moved to Zamzola.
The target of the airstrike in Waziristan was a training base for fighters loyal to a pro-Taleban militant leader called Baitullah Mehsud, according to intelligence officials. Based on intelligence gathered, Sultan said the bodies of eight fighters had been retrieved and 10 were wounded. Intelligence officials from two different agencies said the death toll was more like 20, though they confirmed that of the corpses found so far five were Afghans and the other three belonged to men of the Mehsud tribe. Several wounded were taken to hospitals in North Waziristan’s Miranshah town.
About 1,500 Mehsud tribesmen protested against the airstrike in Tank, a town in the settled area bordering South Waziristan. They chanted slogans against President Pervez Musharraf and the United States, and blocked a main highway with burning tyres.
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Khushid Mahmud Kasuri told journalists in Islamabad the government would honor its deal with the tribal chiefs of Waziristan. He said it was a routine military action to eliminate terrorists operating on the Pak-Afghan border.
