US drone kills 7 militants in Pakistan

PESHAWAR: A suspected US drone aircraft killed at least seven militants in Pakistan’s ethnic Pashtun tribal region on the Afghan border on Friday, Pakistani security officials and residents said.
A pair of missiles launched by a US drone hit a sprawling compound early Thursday morning near the border town of Ghulam Khan in the North Waziristan tribal region — a militant hideout near the Afghan border — killed seven suspected militants, the intelligence officials said. US drones have fired missiles into troubled and inaccessible border areas such as North Waziristan, the main stronghold for militant groups aligned with Al-Qaeda and the Taleban, since 2004.
Security officials said all those who were killed were insurgents. The area where the attack took place is known as a stronghold for the Haqqani network, which regularly attacks US forces in Afghanistan from its mountain hideouts in Pakistan.
The identity and nationality of the slain men was not immediately known, and agents were investigating, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.
The area where the strike took place was believed to be a hiding place for the Afghan Haqqani network, the officials said. US officials consider the Haqqani network to be one of the most dangerous militant factions fighting American troops in neighboring Afghanistan. North Waziristan is a tribal region home to a mix of Pakistani, Afghan and Al-Qaeda-linked foreign militants.
The US drone program causes extreme tension between Pakistan and the United States, though some Pakistani officials privately acknowledge the need for the strikes as its military rarely patrols the area. Washington says it needs to use the unmanned aircraft because Pakistan refuses to engage the fighters. Thursday’s strike came less than a week after a US drone killed three foreign militants in an abandoned seminary in the same region.
Pakistan strongly condemned previous strikes, calling them “unilateral” and a violation of country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. On Friday, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry again called for an end to the drone attacks, saying such “strikes are counter-productive, entail loss of innocent civilian lives and have human rights and humanitarian implications.” “Such strikes also set dangerous precedents in the inter-state relations,” the ministry said in a statement.
Pakistan has been angered by reports of civilian casualties and what it sees as a violation of its sovereignty, and the United States has reduced their use in recent years.
US drone strikes in Pakistan have fallen significantly over the past two and a half years, totalling 20 this year. There were 48 in all of 2012 and 73 in 2011, according to a tally kept by the New America Foundation.
It is hard to check their impact on both militants and civilians because independent observers and journalists have almost no access to the areas where most of the strikes occur.