12 people have been killed in two days in Pakistan after the sixth American drone strike over the last two weeks.
Ten were killed on Sunday when an aircraft fired missiles into a gathering mourning one of two fighters killed by drone strikes the previous day.
US drone tactics in Pakistan continue to come under fire from critics who point out the drastic civilian death toll and the radicalization of the enraged populations there. "Strange to say, the Pakistani people, or at least 97% of them, haven’t taken as well as Washington might have expected to its urge to launch endless drone attacks on their territory...Drones, which have certainly killed their share of “bad guys” (and children) in the Pakistani borderlands, have also managed to throw U.S.-Pakistan relations into chaos," writes journalist Tom Engelhardt.
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The Guardian/UK: US drone attacks kill 12 in Pakistan
Ten more people have been killed by a US drone strike against suspected militants in Pakistan, with the aircraft firing its missiles into a gathering mourning one of two fighters killed in a similar atttack the previous day.
Two Pakistani intelligence officials say four missiles were fired at the village of Mana Raghzai in South Waziristan near the border with Afghanistan on Sunday morning.
At the time of the attack, suspected militants had gathered to offer condolences to the brother of a militant commander killed during another US unmanned drone attack on Saturday. The brother was one of those who died in the Sunday morning attack. The Pakistani officials said two of the dead were foreigners and the rest were Pakistani.
It brought to 12 the total number of people killed in two days and was the sixth American drone strike over the last two weeks. The US government considers the drone campaign a vital tool in the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban.
The drone campaign has been a source of deep frustration and tension between the US and Pakistan. Under Barack Obama the US has stepped up its drone campaign in the Pakistani border areas as a way to combat insurgents and terrorists who use Pakistan as a base for attacks against American and Nato forces in Afghanistan. The number of drone attacks has eased in recent years.
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