Kon BambooSchoot

12 killed in U.S. attack on compound in Pakistan village
As the U.S. campaign against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban militants in Pakistan's tribal areas seemed to intensify Friday, two missiles fired from remotely piloted U.S. aircraft killed 12 people Friday in an attack on a village compound in North Waziristan, according to a local journalist and to television reports.

At the same time, fighting between Pakistani security forces and militants elsewhere in the wild lands bordering Afghanistan killed 32 militants and 2 soldiers, The Associated Press reported, citing a Pakistani Army spokesman, Major Murad Khan.

The missile strike was said to have taken place near Miran Shah, the main settlement in North Waziristan, before first light Friday and was aimed at the home of a local tribesman, Yousaf Khan Wazir, among the dead, a local journalist said on condition of anonymity.

A Pakistani intelligence official said most of the dead in the attack were "Punjabi Taliban," meaning militants from the Punjab Province of Pakistan. The target was said to be a militant training camp, the official said, asking not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The missiles were fired at the village Tole Khel, just east of Miran Shah, and the dead included women and children, according to residents speaking to Pakistani reporters. There was no immediate word on the reported attack from the U.S. or Pakistani military authorities

The Pakistan government has little control in the tribal areas which the United States regards as safe havens for Qaeda and Taliban militants. In July, President George W. Bush approved secret orders permitting U.S. Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior U.S. officials.

Earlier this month, U.S. forces raided a Pakistani village near the Afghan border in an attack that angered Pakistani officials, who asserted that it had achieved little except killing civilians and stoking anti-Americanism in the tribal areas.

According to two U.S. officials briefed on the raid, more than two dozen members of the Navy Seals spent several hours on the ground, supported by an AC-130 gunship, and killed about two dozen suspected Qaeda fighters before they were whisked away by helicopter. Some Pakistani officials have made it clear they prefer the CIA's Predator drone aircraft as the means of killing Qaeda operatives without the deployment of U.S. troops on the ground.

In the missile strike Friday, Pakistani gunships hovered over the area after the attack and a Pakistani military convoy in the area was hit by a roadside bomb that wounded three government soldiers, Pakistani state television reported.

The attack was the second of its kind this week. On Monday, a missile strike from a Predator killed several Arab operatives of Al Qaeda. The missile strikes are seen as part of a more aggressive overall U.S. campaign in the border region less than two months before the U.S. presidential elections.