PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Suspected U.S. missiles slammed into a compound near the Afghanistan border Saturday, killing about 30 people, local officials said. Most of the people killed were thought to be militants linked to the Taliban or al-Qaeda.
The raid came two days after Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., perhaps inadvertently, made the first public disclosure by a senior U.S. official that the CIA-operated drones are flown from bases inside Pakistan, not from across the border in Afghanistan.
The missile attacks have been a problem for Pakistan’s struggling civilian leadership, which is thought to have given a go-ahead for the raids, although it publicly decries them.
The wrecked compound belonged to an associate of Baitullah Mahsud, the leader of Pakistan’s Taliban movement, and was not far from Mahsud’s own headquarters. He was not thought to have been at the compound, and it was unclear whether he was the intended target.
About a dozen people were reported to have been injured in the raid near Wana, the main town in the restive South Waziristan tribal region. The area is considered a militant stronghold and has been hit repeatedly in an intense campaign of American strikes using pilotless drones.
Local sources said the dead included Arabs and Uzbeks; generally, the presence of foreign militants is a sign of links to al-Qaeda.
Mahsud has been blamed by the Pakistani government for masterminding the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Pakistan’s current government is led by Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari.
