US drone strikes are one of the most contentious issues between uneasy allies Pakistan and the United States, whose ties have been strained after bin Laden’s discovery in a garrison town.
WANA: A missile strike by a US drone killed at least 6 militants in Pakistan’s South Waziristan, intelligence officials said, the second such attack in the tribal frontier region in less than a week.
A senior al Qaeda operative, Ilyas Kashmiri, was reported tohave been killed in a similar strike in the largely lawless area which borders Afghanistan on June 2.
“The missiles hit a militant compound in the mountains near Wana,” a local intelligence official said, referring to the main town of the ethnic Pashtun South Waziristan region.
Another intelligence official said seven militants were killed and all of them were ‘Punjabi Taliban’, a term used for insurgents hailing from Pakistan’s biggest province.
The Pakistani Taliban, which is allied to al Qaeda, has stepped up attacks against the military and security forces since the killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a US raid in Pakistan last month.
US drone strikes are one of the most contentious issues between uneasy allies Pakistan and the United States, whose ties have been strained after bin Laden’s discovery in a garrison town.
US drones struck targets near Wana on Friday, killing several militants, and Pakistan’s interior minister on Sunday said he was ‘98 per cent sure’ that Kashmiri was among the dead.
A militant commander in Wana also said that Kashmiri died in the attack but a US National Security official in Washington, however, said he could not confirm the report and warned it could be premature.
The elimination of Kashmiri would be another coup for the United States after American special forces killed Osama bin Laden in a garrison town of Abbottabad on May 2.
The US Department of State has labeled Kashmiri a “specially designated global terrorist”. He has been linked to attacks including the 2008 rampage through the Indian city of Mumbai which killed 166 people.
The Pakistani media has speculated that Kashmiri was the mastermind of an attack on the PNS Mehran naval base in Karachi last month which humiliated the Pakistani military.