US drone strikes in Pakistan tribal areas boost support for Taleban

London Times

The deafening explosion rent the calm of the winter night. A house disappeared in a cloud of flame and dust, its thick earthen walls splaying into the street.

“We ran from our house to help but it was after curfew, and soldiers in a nearby post began to fire on us,” Amir Shah Jehn, 25, said. “So it wasn’t until morning that the bodies were pulled from the rubble and laid at the roadside. There were five dead: a three-month-old baby, the woman of the house, two young men and an Arab.”

It was November 2005. The strike on a house sheltering an Egyptian al-Qaeda commander, Abu Hamza Rabia, in the village of Hamzoni five miles (8km) outside Miran Shah, the capital of North Waziristan, was one of the first carried out by a Predator drone in Pakistani tribal areas.

“We didn’t know what happened back then,” said Amir, an alias he uses for security reasons. “But now it’s routine. There is the constant sound of drones. Sometimes up to seven are flying over us. We call them jasoos — spies.”

Drones are the Obama Administration’s weapon of choice for killing militants in the tribal areas. The pilotless Reapers and Predators have chalked up a long list of insurgent deaths, accounting for scores of leaders from al-Qaeda and the Taleban since their deployment in 2004.

The effects of the campaign, however, are beginning to veer dramatically off course as the strikes intensify, according to tribesmen.

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