“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters, which first reported the news. In addition to the 30 who were killed, 40 were injured. The United States killed 30 more Wednesday when a drone strike intended for an Islamic State stronghold instead struck a group of farmers resting after a day picking pine nuts. Please bookmark and sign up for our newsletters here.In the past 10 years, an estimated 16,000 civilians have died in Afghanistan, according to the United Nations. Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. personnel to leave the Shamsi air base in southwestern Pakistan, widely believed to have been a hub for the CIA drone programme, and is thought likely to only reopen the Afghan border by exacting taxes on convoys. Pakistan is reviewing its entire alliance with the United States and has kept its Afghan border closed to NATO supply convoys since the November strike. The New America Foundation think-tank in Washington says drone strikes in Pakistan have killed between 1,715 and 2,680 people in the past eight years. drone attacks, despite public condemnation in a country where the U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks in late 2010 showed that Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders privately supported U.S. The programme has dramatically increased as the Obama administration looks to withdraw all foreign combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. missile strikes were reported in Pakistan’s tribal belt in 2009, the year Obama took office, 101 in 2010 and 64 in 2011. drones target Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants on Pakistani soil, but American officials do not discuss details of the covert programme.Īccording to an AFP tally, 45 U.S. President Barack Obama last month confirmed for the first time that U.S. On Thursday, Pakistan hosted Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a regional summit at a key juncture in peace efforts with the Taliban. The United States has blamed the Haqqani network for some of the most spectacular attacks carried out in Kabul, including last September’s siege of the U.S. Mansoor was considered one of America’s main targets in the country, wanted for bomb attacks on the minority Ahmadi sect that killed nearly 100 people in May 2010 and the chief link between Al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. Last Thursday, officials said Mansoor, described as the “de facto leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan” was killed in a drone strike in North Waziristan. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Those killed in the first attack were loyalists of Badar Mansoor and the Haqqani network, loyal to the Afghan Taliban whose leaders are understood to be based in North Waziristan, one of the Pakistani officials said. The United States says Pakistan’s tribal belt provides sanctuary to Taliban fighting in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda groups plotting attacks on the West, and Pakistani Taliban who routinely bomb Pakistan and other foreign fighters. “The vehicle caught fire and the dead bodies are badly mutilated,” he added. “At least eight militant have been killed in the second strike,” he said, describing them all as “foreigners.”Īnother security official in Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan, put the death toll at 12, saying they were all Uzbek Islamist fighters. “The death toll may rise,” a Pakistani security official warned AFP after the second strike targeted militants travelling in a double cabin pick-up. Five militants were killed in the first attack that destroyed a compound in Spalga town near Miranshah and at least eight died in the second attack on a vehicle near the town of Mir Ali, about 25 kilometres to the east.
0 kommentar(er)
