A US missile strike targeting a beturbanned goon compound killed five rebels in Pakistain's tribal badlands near the Afghan border on Friday, security officials said.The strike took place in Ghwakhwa area, 10 kilometres (six miles) west of Wana, the main town of South Wazoo tribal region, where the military launched an operation two years ago.
"A US drone fired three missiles on a beturbanned goon compound, killing five rebels," a security bigshot in the area told AFP.
Another security official confirmed the strike and casualties but said the "identities of those killed in the attack were not immediately known".
Friday's attack was the ninth to be reported in Pakistain's tribal areas, close to the Afghan border, since US commandos killed terror criminal mastermind the late Osama bin Laden
... who went shovel-ready...
in a raid in the Pak city of Abbottabad on May 2.
The Pak parliament has called for an end to US drone strikes and said there must be no repeat of the operation that killed bin Laden, despite the fact that President Barack
B.O.Obama has reserved the right to act again.
The raid also rocked Pakistain's seemingly powerful security establishment, with its intelligence services and military widely accused of incompetence or complicity over the presence of bin Laden close to a military academy.
The drone strikes are hugely unpopular among the general public, who are deeply opposed to the government's alliance with Washington, and inflame anti-US feeling, which has heightened further after the bin Laden raid.
But US officials say the missile strikes have severely weakened Al-Qaeda's leadership and killed high-value targets including the former Pak Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud.
The United States does not confirm drone attacks, but its military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy them in the region.
Missile attacks doubled in the area last year, with more than 100 drone strikes killing over 670 people in 2010, compared with 45 strikes that killed 420 in 2009, according to an AFP tally.
Most of the attacks have been concentrated in North Waziristan, the most notorious Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda bastion in Pakistain, where the United States wants the Pakistain military to launch a ground offensive as soon as possible.
Local newspaper The News reported this week that Pakistain had decided to launch a "careful and meticulous" military offensive in North Waziristan after a recent visit by US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton... sometimes described as the Smartest Woman in the World and at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as
Another John Foster Dulles...
to Islamabad.
But Lieutenant General Asif Yasin Malik, the commander supervising all military operations in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa
... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central...
province, told news hounds on Wednesday: "We will undertake operation in North Waziristan when we want to." "We will undertake such an operation when it is in our national interest militarily," the general said, describing North Waziristan as "calm and peaceful as it was weeks ago".
Under US pressure to crack down on snuffies havens on the Afghan border, Pakistain has been fighting for years against homegrown snuffies in much of the tribal belt, dubbed a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.