Drone strikes kill 30 in Taliban leadership in two strikes

Radio Free Europe:
A second round of missile strikes by suspected U.S. drones has killed at least 11 more Taliban, including senior commanders, a day after strikes killed 20 militants in the southeastern border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, officials said.

Baseer Khan Wazir, the top administrative official in the Kurram Agency, part of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, told Reuters on October 17 that the drones fired on Taliban hideouts and killed at least 31 people over two days.

Taliban sources told Reuters that 24 members of the extremist Haqqani network, which is based in Pakistan and allied with the Taliban, were killed in drone strikes over two days, including some commanders.

An Afghan official told the Associated Press that the latest drone strikes on October 17 killed 35 Taliban fighters, including a commander of the Pakistani Taliban, Abu Bakr, and other senior insurgents.

Abdullah Asrat, spokesman for the governor of Paktia Province, told AP that another 15 militants were wounded in the strikes.

Mujeeb Rahman Chamkani, a lawmaker from Paktia, told AP that the latest strikes occurred as the Taliban were collecting the bodies of the 20 militants killed the previous day.

Intelligence officials said the drone strikes had targeted the Haqqani network and Bakr. They said the large number of militants present in the compound struck on October 16 showed the site was a main center for Haqqani network militants in the area.

The latest drone strikes came after attacks by Taliban suicide bombers killed at least 74 people on October 17. Most of the deaths from the bombings occurred in the southeastern provinces of Paktia and Ghazni.
...
The Haqqanis have been helping the Taliban and al Qaeda for decades.  Destroying theri operation should be a high priority.  If Pakistan were an honest partner in this process they would be doing the same in the Haqqani base in that country.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more