At least nine suspected militants, including two foreigners, were
killed in Pakistan's lawless tribal region in a U.S. drone strike and
a separate Pakistan military operation, security officials said on
Sunday.
Pakistan has seen a spate of militant attacks since Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif took office last month, putting pressure on his team to
act more aggressively to curb the insurgency.
Missile strikes by unmanned U.S. aircraft have inflicted the most
damage against Taliban fighters in the mountainous areas straddling
the Afghan border in past years, sometimes with heavy civilian
casualties.
In the third such attack since Sharif came to power, two suspected
militants riding a motorcycle were struck by missiles in the Mir Ali
area of North Waziristan on Saturday night, one official said.
"The two men, probably Arab nationals, were passing through Mosaki
village when the drone fired two missiles and hit them," said the
official.
Their identities were not clear. Another security source said they
were foreign militants of Turkmen origin.
It is difficult to check the impact of drone attacks on both militants
and civilians because independent observers and journalists have
almost no access to the areas where most of the strikes occur.
The government, while condemning drone attacks as a violation of its
sovereignty, wants to appear decisive in its own efforts to combat
militants on its soil and has vowed to map out a new security strategy
to tackle the insurgency.
In a separate operation by the Pakistan Air Force, jets pounded
several militant hideouts overnight, killing seven insurgents, senior
security officials said.
"These areas are known as strongholds of the militants from where they
stage deadly attacks in Kohat and Peshawar," one official in Kohat
told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Pakistani military officials believe mountains linking the Orakzai,
Khyber and Kurram tribal areas are one of the main strongholds for the
Taliban-linked militants in Pakistan.
Another senior military official in the northwestern frontier city of
Peshawar confirmed that air strikes had taken place "somewhere between
Orakzai and Khyber".
"We could hear the sounds of fighter jets and see flames when bombs
were dropped in the mountains," Shafqat Hussain, a local resident in
Kohat, said of the overnight operation.
Many Taliban and their al Qaeda allies fled Afghanistan to Pakistan's
tribal areas after the U.S. invasion in 2001. They retreated even
deeper into the mountains following a Pakistan army offensive in 2009,
launching attacks from places where ground forces cannot reach them.
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