Eight Islamist militants were killed in a US missile strike in northwest Pakistan yesterday, officials said, after three policemen were killed in a bomb blast.
The US has carried out 45 attacks with its pilotless, missile-firing aircraft in northwest Pakistan this year as its forces in neighboring Afghanistan have faced an intensifying Taliban insurgency.
The latest strike, the second this week, targeted a fortified militant compound and a vehicle near the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan, a lawless ethnic Pashtun region on the Afghan border and apparently a major al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctuary.
“Eight people have been killed,” an intelligence official in the region said. “All of them are militants,” he said later, though adding their identities were not known.
Pakistan officially objects to the US drone strikes, saying they violate its sovereignty, even though the Pakistani army has been battling militants in neighboring South Waziristan since last month.
US officials say the drone strikes are carried out under an agreement with Islamabad that allows Pakistani leaders to decry the attacks in public.
There were 32 such strikes last year, according to a Reuters tally of reports from Pakistani security agents, government officials and residents.
The army went on the offensive in South Waziristan on the Afghan border on Oct. 17, aiming to root out militants who escalated their war against the security forces in 2007.
The militants have responded with intensified attacks in towns and cities.
Peshawar, capital of the North West Frontier Province, has borne the brunt of the attacks. Of eight bomb attacks in the country this month — six of them have been in Peshawar which is near the Afghan border and is also close to militant strongholds in tribal areas.
In the latest attack, three policemen were killed and six wounded when a roadside bomb blew up their vehicle in Peshawar shortly after midnight.
Hours earlier, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a court building in the city, killing 18 people.
“This is literally a war going on,” provincial chief minister Amir Haider Khan Hoti told reporters after the funeral of policemen killed in the Thursday attack.
“But we will be not pressurized ... we will confront this situation,” he said.
The US, weighing options for how to stem an intensifying insurgency in Afghanistan, has welcomed the Waziristan offensive, but is keen to see Pakistan tackle Afghan Taliban factions based in lawless enclaves along the border.
The violence has rattled investors in Pakistani stocks, but the main index was 0.90 percent higher at 9,334.13 at the mid-day break.
Investors are getting used to the almost daily violence and are hoping for an interest cut next week, dealers say.
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