View U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan in a larger map.
The big
news yesterday: an al-Qaeda commander involved in providing explosives for
the Jordanian doctor who killed himself and seven CIA officers and contractors
in late December 2009 at a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan was killed on March 8 by
a drone strike in Miram Shah, the main town in the Pakistani tribal agency of
North Waziristan. Hussein al-Yemeni, who apparently had
ties to some of the most well-known militant groups in the region and
abroad -- the Haqqanis, the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani
Taliban, and al-Qaeda in Yemen
-- is the seventh key militant leader to be droned so far in 2010, according to
our drones database.
Nearly all of the drone strikes in Pakistan this year have been in North Waziristan, and the leaders the drones have killed underlines
the mish-mash of militants that operate in the tribal agency. A Punjabi Taliban
commander and the head of the sectarian militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi who
was wanted in the 2006 bombing of the U.S.
consulate in Karachi
died in late
February. Siraj Haqqani's younger brother Muhammad was killed a few days
earlier (though there is some
debate
about whether he was actually involved with the militant movement). Abdul Haq
Turkistani, described as an al-Qaeda linked militant and leader of a "radical
Uighur group" called the Turkistani Islamic Party, died in Tappi, a few miles east of Miram Shah, in
mid-February. A Jordanian Taliban commander who was a bodyguard for Mustafa
Abu al-Yazid, al-Qaeda's current number three, was killed
in January. And of course, the drones' biggest target this year, the chief of
the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan
Hakimullah Mehsud, is now
believed to be dead from injuries sustained in a strike in mid-January.
Given the militants of various stripes and affiliations who
have been killed in North Waziristan this year alone, it's not surprising,
then, that more than half of all drone strikes reported since 2004 have taken
place in that tribal agency. The chart below shows the breakdown of strikes by
agency.
|
|
2004-7
|
2008
|
2009
|
2010*
|
Total
|
|
North Waziristan
|
6
|
20
|
22
|
23
|
65
|
|
South Waziristan
|
2
|
13
|
26
|
1
|
42
|
|
Other
|
1
|
1
|
5
|
0
|
13
|
|
Total
|
9
|
34
|
53
|
24
|
120
|
*March 18, 2010
There are several key points worth noting. The first is that
the number of strikes in South Waziristan doubled from 2008 to 2009, and only 3
of the 26 in that agency that year happened after August 5, 2009 when the first
TTP chief Baitullah Mehsud was
killed in Zanghara, a small hamlet in South Waziristan.
Sixteen of the 26 strikes in South Waziristan
in 2009 were described in press reports as targeting Baitullah
personally.
The Pakistani military offensive in South Waziristan also
appears to have deterred the CIA from targeting any militants in the south last
fall; after operations began
there on October 17, 2009, not a single Agency missile was fired on the
southern side of the Waziristan border,
according to media reports. This halt was reportedly at the request
of the Pakistani military, and as the operations pushed
fleeing militants into North Waziristan, drone
strikes there have gone up. This, along with the slew of recent
captures
of Taliban leaders in Pakistan, adds to the data
points suggesting a growing degree of cooperation between the U.S. and the
Pakistani government.
And where the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, is
holed up is anyone's guess. None of the media accounts of the drone strikes has
reported him as the target. CIA director Leon Panetta told
the Washington Post that bin Laden might be in North Waziristan (where
there have been 65 reported drone strikes in the last six years) or the
northern tribal areas (where there have been far fewer), but there hasn't been
a confirmed sighting of the terrorist leader since 2003. He seems to have
vanished like
a wraith.
(2)
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