US disputes drone strike allegation
ISLAMABAD: One day after a US drone strike killed a leader of the militant Haqqani network in northwestern Pakistan, US officials on Thursday rejected a claim by Pakistan that the strike had targeted an Afghan refugee camp.
There were also conflicting accounts of the location of the drone strike and the number of people killed.
A statement by Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday condemned the strike and maintained that it had “targeted an Afghan refugee camp in Kurram Agency” — an assertion the United States rejected on Thursday.
“The claim in an MFA statement yesterday that US forces struck an Afghan refugee camp in Kurram Agency yesterday is false,” said Richard Snelsire, US Embassy spokesman in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.
US officials said that there were no Afghan refugee camps in Kurram, a remote tribal region straddling the border with Afghanistan, where they said Wednesday’s drone strike had taken place. The strike, which killed Nasir Mehmood, a commander of the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network, was at least the third US drone strike in the past two months in Pakistani territory.
The UN refugee agency also said it had not been operating in the tribal regions of Pakistan since 2005. “We don’t have any access to Fata,” said Qaisar Khan Afridi, the agency’s spokesman said, referring to the semi-autonomous tribal regions.
But Pakistani officials maintain there are 43 Afghan refugee settlements in KhyberPakhtunkhwa province, and that some of the settlements overlap with the adjoining tribal regions.
The Pakistani military said in a statement that the drone strike had singled out a house in one such settlement in the province’s Hangu district, and that Afghan refugees were present in the settlement. The settlement was not an “organised terrorist sanctuary”, it said.
A Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the confusion about the location had arisen as the targeted house was in a settlement at the junction of the Kurram, North Waziristan and Hangu regions.
The number of people killed in the strike was also disputed. Although initial reports from the remote region said that two of the commander’s aides had died in the strike, local news media reported on Thursday that only two people in total had been killed.
The Pakistani security official said the security forces could confirm only the militant commander’s death.
The conflicting accounts of the drone strike are yet another strain on US-Pakistan ties.