Drones Kill Westerners in Pakistan
By MARK MAZZETTI and SOUAD MEKHENNET
Published: October 4, 2010
======================================================
The missile strikes were part of an escalating barrage of attacks by the C.I.A. over the past month, and come amid tension in European capitals over the possibility that operatives of Al Qaeda who are based in Pakistan and North Africa might be planning terrorist attacks somewhere on the continent.WASHINGTON — Drone aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency killed several militants with German citizenship in the mountains of Pakistan on Monday, according to Pakistani and American officials.
A small stream of German Muslims has traveled to Pakistan’s mountainous tribal areas in recent years, part of what some European counterterrorism officials see as Al Qaeda’s effort to recruit young Westerners who might be able to return to Europe or the United States to carry out attacks.
It was unclear whether the drone strikes on Monday were related to the suspected terrorist plots in Europe. News organizations in Pakistan reported that missiles struck a mosque in Mir Ali, a town in North Waziristan, the region where most of the drone strikes have occurred this year.
American officials offered few details about the strikes on Monday, and there were conflicting reports about the number of German militants killed in the attacks. A Pakistani official said 10 to 12 people were killed, at least four of them German.
Usually, it takes the C.I.A several days to analyze communication intercepts and other information to confirm the identities of those killed in airstrikes.
On Sunday, the State Department issued a vague travel alert to Americans in Europe,warning of threats to “tourist infrastructure,” but not mentioning any specific countries that might be at risk. Over the past week, American officials have said they were gathering intelligence about multiple plots that could involve attacks in France, Germany and Britain like those two years ago in Mumbai, India.
Germany’s top security official, Thomas de Maizière, on Monday played down concern that Al Qaeda was plotting attacks against some of Berlin’s landmarks. “There is no concrete indication of impending attacks,” Mr. de Maizière said in a short news conference in Berlin.
Mr. de Maizière, the interior minister, spoke Sunday night with Janet Napolitano, the United States secretary of homeland security, to discuss the American travel alert.
Security in Berlin has increased around government ministry buildings and political parties’ headquarters and at the airport and major railway stations.
In recent years American and European intelligence officials have grown concerned about groups of young men from Germany and Britain who have been training in militant camps in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
German security officials think this trend has been inspired in part by a proliferation of radical German-language videos on the Internet, including some made by a group called the German Taliban Mujahedeen.
Officials have said that the exact number of Germans traveling to Pakistan is hard to determine because of the route that many Germans take: leaving the country by car to elude airport security and then traveling to Turkey and ultimately Iran, where smugglers take them to Pakistan.
The C.I.A. carried out 21 drone strikes in September, the most in one month, and has already carried out several strikes in October. American officials said the escalation was the result of two factors: an attempt to disrupt militant networks that attacked American troops in Afghanistan, and efforts to strike militant cells in Pakistan that might be coordinating terrorist plots in Europe.
Most of the strikes have occurred in North Waziristan, a region abutting the Afghan border that has become a safe haven for Qaeda militants and operatives of the Haqqani network, a group responsible for a wave of violence in Afghanistan.
American officials have tried to press Pakistan’s military to begin an offensive in North Waziristan, but the government has resisted, citing strained resources from military operations elsewhere in the tribal areas.
No comments:
Post a Comment