ISLAMABAD: A suspected US missile strike yesterday killed at least three foreign militants in the northwest Pakistan stronghold of a local Taleban commander, a senior security official said.
The strike was the second in as many days in the South Waziristan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan, where hundreds of extremists fled after the US-led invasion in late 2001 that toppled the Taleban regime in Kabul.
There have been more than two dozen such strikes on northwest Pakistan since August, sparking angry government criticism of the United States, a close ally which is believed to be launching the missiles from unmanned CIA aircraft.
“Two missiles were fired on Taleban offices near Ladha village in South Waziristan, killing three foreign militants and wounding two others,” the security official told AFP. The official said he had no details on the nationalities of the foreigners.
Ladha, located about 40 kilometers from the Afghan border, is the stronghold of Baitullah Mehsud, who leads the country’s umbrella Taleban organization, Tehreek-e-Taleban Pakistan (TTP).
The shadowy Mehsud was accused by the government of former President Pervez Musharraf and US officials of masterminding the assassination of former Premier Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. His group is influential in both North and South Waziristan, as well as in Bajaur tribal district to the north, where Pakistani security forces launched a major anti-militant offensive in August last year. Reports surfaced in October that Mehsud was seriously ill. His whereabouts is not currently known.
The offices destroyed in yesterday’s strike were once a girls’ school that was taken over several months ago by fighters loyal to Mehsud. “Several Taleban approached the school building after it was hit by the first missile. The drone fired the second missile afterward,” said one resident who asked not to be named out of fear of reprisals.
On Thursday, at least five militants were killed in the Karikot area of South Waziristan close to the Afghan border. Eight suspected militants were killed in a missile strike in the same area last month.
Islamabad also launched an offensive this week in the Khyber tribal area to clear militants from the route used by NATO supply trucks to reach Afghanistan. The road was reopened for five hours yesterday to allow traffic to reach the famed Khyber Pass on the Afghan-Pakistani border. The offensive, which has used artillery and helicopter gunships to destroy suspected militant hideouts, will continue, but not close enough to the road through the famed Khyber Pass to disrupt traffic, said local administration head Tariq Hayat Khan.
Hayat told Arab News yesterday afternoon, “under traditional rules of tribal areas security forces razed to ground few houses of these unlawful elements who had attacked and looted NATO trucks in the recent past.”
The highway was reopened only from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. (0600-1100 GMT) when authorities relaxed the curfew in force in Jamrud, local administration official Rahat Gul said.
In another development, Pakistan’s leading welfare organization, the Edhi Foundation, has termed 2008 as a year of suicides and suicidal attacks during which terrorist attacks increased by 50 percent as compared to 2007.
“The number of suicides and suicidal attacks increased by 50 percent in 2008 as compared to the previous year,” the internationally acknowledged Edhi Foundation said in its report released yesterday.
The report said that 3,325 people committed suicide in Pakistan during 2008. It said that 51 terrorist attacks were recorded, including suicide attacks across the country. “We haven’t compiled the reasons for these suicides but the main reason is unemployment and poverty, leading to hunger and forcing people to commit suicide,” Edhi Foundation Chairman Abdul Sattar Edhi told IANS.
— With input from agencies
