A US missile strike targeting a militant compound killed five rebels in Pakistan’s tribal badlands near the Afghan border on Friday, security officials said.
The strike took place in the Ghwakhwa area, 10km west of Wana, the main town of the South Waziristan tribal region, where the military launched an operation two years ago.
“A US drone fired three missiles on a militant compound, killing five rebels,” a senior security official in the area said.
Another security official confirmed the strike and casualties, but said the “identities of those killed in the attack were not immediately known.”
Friday’s attack was the ninth to be reported in Pakistan’s tribal areas, close to the Afghan border, since US commandoes killed late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a raid in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad on May 2.
The Pakistani parliament has called for an end to US drone strikes and said there must be no repeat of the operation that killed bin Laden, although US President Barack Obama has reserved the right to act again.
The raid also rocked Pakistan’s seemingly powerful security establishment, with its intelligence services and military widely accused of incompetence or complicity over the presence of bin Laden close to a military academy.
The drone strikes are hugely unpopular among the general public, who are deeply opposed to the government’s alliance with Washington, and inflame anti-US feeling, which has heightened further after the bin Laden raid.
However, US officials say the missile strikes have severely weakened al-Qaeda’s leadership and killed high-value targets including the former Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud.
The US does not confirm drone attacks, but its military and the CIA operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy them in the region.
Missile attacks doubled in the area last year, with more than 100 drone strikes killing more than 670 people last year, compared with 45 strikes that killed 420 in 2009, according to an Agence France-Presse tally.
Most of the attacks have been concentrated in North Waziristan, an Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda bastion in Pakistan, where the US wants the Pakistan military to launch a ground offensive as soon as possible.
Local newspaper the News reported this week that Pakistan had decided to launch a “careful and meticulous” military offensive in North Waziristan after a recent visit by US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Islamabad.
However, Lieutenant General Asif Yasin Malik, the commander supervising all military operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, told reporters on Wednesday: “We will undertake operations in North Waziristan when we want to.”
“We will undertake such an operation when it is in our national interest militarily,” the general said.
Malik described North Waziristan as “calm and peaceful as it was weeks ago.”
Under US pressure to crack down on Islamist havens on the Afghan border, Pakistan has been fighting for years against homegrown militants in much of the tribal belt, dubbed a global headquarters of al-Qaeda.
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