Five killed' in US missile strike in Pakistan

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Missiles fired from a US drone aircraft Tuesday killed five suspected Taliban in a strike on a militant hideout in Pakistan's northwest tribal belt, local officials said.
The attack hit in the lawless region of South Waziristan, a Taliban bolthole where Washington says Islamist fighters are hiding out and planning attacks on Western troops stationed in neighbouring Afghanistan.
"A missile from a US drone fired on a compound of local Taliban commander Irfan Mehsud and killed five militants and injured six," said a security official in the area. A local administration official confirmed the toll.
The missiles targeted Sara Rogha, a village northeast of regional hub Wana and a stronghold of former Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who was himself killed in a US drone strike in August.
The security official said the spy plane fired two missiles on the compound, adding that reports suggested three of the dead could be Uzbeks.
"The death toll may rise," he told AFP. "The compound is completely destroyed and militants have surrounded the area."
The fatalities are impossible to verify independently, as the US does not confirm the strikes and the targets are deep in Taliban-controlled territory.
An intelligence official, who also refused to be named, said militants were pulling their dead from the debris. He said his reports suggested low-level insurgent commander Irfan Mehsud had survived.
US drone attacks are hitting the tribal belt with increasing frequency, as the United States tries to stem the flow of militants waging a deadly insurgency against some 100,000 foreign troops stationed in Afghanistan.
Taliban and Al-Qaeda rebels fled Afghanistan after the 2001 US-led invasion, carving out boltholes and training camps in the remote Pakistani mountains.
Late last Thursday, a US drone attack in North Waziristan killed 10 militants from an Al-Qaeda-linked network, and Tuesday's attack is the fifth such strike in the semi-autonomous tribal area this month.
The US military does not, as a rule, confirm drone attacks, but its armed forces and the Central Intelligence Agency operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy pilotless drones in the region.
Islamabad publicly opposes the US missile strikes, saying they violate its territorial sovereignty and deepen resentment among the populace.
Since August 2008, nearly 60 such strikes have killed more than 550 people.
But the government welcomed the death of Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in a US drone attack on August 5.
Pakistan's security forces are also engaged in a fierce offensive against Taliban fighters in the northwest whom they blame for a wave of attacks across Pakistan that has killed more than 2,100 people in the last two years.
The military launched a fierce offensive against insurgents in Swat valley in April, and is now engaged in a similar push in tribal Khyber district.
Pakistani air strikes have also hit South Waziristan, ahead of an expected ground offensive into the Pakistani Taliban's heartland, although the army is keeping silent on when such an assault would begin.
Swat is beset by outbreaks of violence as authorities try and round up all the Islamist fighters, with the military announcing Tuesday that they had arrested 43 insurgents in the district in the past 24 hours.