US drones kill 8 in Pakistan

A US drone strike in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt on Tuesday killed eight fighters supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan but not hostile to Pakistani authorities, local officials said.

Pakistani warlord Maulvi Nazir's loyalists, two of them commanders, were attacked in the remote Drey Nishtar area used to slip across the border from South Waziristan into Afghanistan to attack US-led NATO troops.

Waziristan is the most notorious stronghold of militants in Pakistan's semi-autonomous northwestern tribal belt that Washington considers the premier hub of Taliban and Al-Qaeda plotting attacks on the West and in Afghanistan.

"The target of the attack was fighters of commander Maulvi Nazir. A total of eight fighters were killed in this attack," one Pakistani official told AFP on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

Security officials said US drones fired up to four missiles into a vehicle travelling through the far-flung and mountainous area.

"Informers told us that two senior commanders of Maulvi Nazir were among the dead. Both commanders, Amir Hamza and Shamsullah, were considered important for Nazir," the Pakistani official added.

Nazir sends fighters into Afghanistan to attack US and NATO troops, but is considered pro-Pakistan because he does not attack Pakistani troops bogged down fighting homegrown Taliban insurgents in the tribal belt.

US diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks in late 2010 showed that Pakistan's civilian and military leaders privately supported US drone attacks, despite public condemnation in a country where the US alliance is hugely unpopular.

It was unclear whether Tuesday's drone strike would have any immediate impact on Nazir's policy of not attacking Pakistani troops.

President Barack Obama in January confirmed for the first time that US drones target militants on Pakistani soil, but American officials do not discuss details of the covert programme.

US officials consider the attacks a key component in the war against Al-Qaeda operatives and members of the Taliban as the Obama administration looks to withdraw all foreign combat troops from Afghanistan by 2014.

But the attacks fuel anti-American resentment in Pakistan, whose relations with the United States nosedived over the covert raid that killed Osama bin Laden last May and air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November.

The New America Foundation think-tank in Washington says drone strikes have killed between 1,715 and 2,680 people in Pakistan in the past eight years.

Islamabad is now reviewing its US alliance in the wake of the November deaths and has kept its Afghan border closed to NATO supply convoys since then.

It ordered US personnel to leave the Shamsi air base in southwestern Pakistan, widely believed to have been a hub for the CIA drone programme, and is thought likely to impose taxes on convoys if it reopens the Afghan border.

In a recent Washington Post article looking at the recalibrated relationship, a slowdown in drone attacks -- causing Islamabad less irritation -- was listed as one of the key parameters.

According to an AFP tally, 45 US missile strikes were reported in Pakistan's tribal belt in 2009, the year Obama took office, 101 in 2010 and 64 in 2011. Tuesday's attack was the ninth reported so far this year.

In North Waziristan, gunmen on Tuesday shot dead the top government official in the town of Mir Ali, Azmat Jamal, after barging into his office, Pakistani security officials said.

"Five gunmen managed to enter inside his office and opened fire on him, he was taken to hospital where he died," one official told AFP.

"Attackers also hurled hand grenade before fleeing the scene," a second official told AFP.

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