Six suspected rebels were killed Thursday after a U.S. drone shot in north-western Pakistan, the first carried out tribal or semi-tribal areas that are Taliban strongholds, according to local authorities.
It is also the first U.S. drone bombing in the country for whoever killed Hakimullah Mehsud, leader of the Taliban Movement of Pakistan (TTP), the main rebel movement in the country, in the tribal area of North Waziristan in early of the month.
The attack took place Thursday morning at Tal, a district town of Hangu in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders the tribal areas. If Hangu is close to tribal areas, this is the first time a U.S. drone strike that usually that tribal or semi tribal areas bombed a target in one of the four provinces of Pakistan.
She referred by local authorities belonging to a religious seminary Haqqani network, one of the most powerful branches of the Afghan Taliban fighting the Kabul government and its NATO allies, led by Washington, for over twelve years.
Pakistani border regions of north-western Afghanistan, including the tribal areas are clandestine bases for the Afghan Taliban, occasional allies of their Pakistani counterparts TTP who fight them, the government in Islamabad.
“The shooting for the seminar drone killed six people,” he told AFP an official of the local police, Farid Khan, adding that the identities of the victims were not immediately known. The previous record, given the same source, reported five deaths and one injury.
Other local security officials have identified their side two of the dead as the mullahs Ahmad Jan and Hameedullah, two members of the Haqqani network.
Accused of having committed several of the bloodiest attacks of the last decade in Afghanistan, including the capital Kabul, Haqqani is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.
The United States bombed regularly since 2004 to eliminate the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies. This campaign has intensified since 2008, the point of becoming almost daily at some time in recent years. However, the pace has slowed over the past year.
Pakistan officially condemns the shooting he considers an infringement of its sovereignty, but unofficially supports, according to many observers.
The number of civilian victims of the shooting impossible to independently verify, is controversial. According to the Pakistani government, if the drones were 2,160 people in total since 2008, only 67 (3%) of them are civilians, the remainder being Afghan or Pakistani rebel fighters.
But many organizations believe, however, that civilian deaths from drones in the hundreds. In a report published this month, the UN rapporteur Ben Emmerson wrote that Pakistan had told him that 400 of the 2,200 victims of U.S. drones in Pakistan since ten years, 18% were civilians.
Pakistan: 6 killed in a U.S drone strike in the northwest
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