Airstrike by U.S. Draws Protests From Pakistanis
By
CARLOTTA GALL
Published: January 15, 2006
PESHAWAR,
Pakistan, Jan. 14 - Pakistan's government on Saturday condemned a deadly American airstrike on a village in the northwestern tribal region, and a senior Pakistani security official said he was confident that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No. 2 leader of Al Qaeda and the target of the strike, had not been in the village when it was hit.
The New York Times
Tribesmen demonstrated on Saturday against the Damadola attack.
In a statement, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry condemned the loss of civilian lives and said it had delivered an official protest to the American ambassador in Islamabad. Pakistan's information minister, Sheik Rashid Ahmed, said in Islamabad that the government wanted "to assure the people we will not allow such incidents to reoccur," The Associated Press reported.
Local officials in the Bajaur district, where the airstrike happened, said 18 civilians had been killed in the attack, including six children. But the senior Pakistani official who spoke of Mr. Zawahiri suggested that the death toll was higher, and he said that at least 11 militants had been killed in the attack. Seven of the dead were Arab fighters, and another four were Pakistani militants from Punjab Province, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the news media.
American and Pakistani officials have said that the American airstrike, on the village of Damadola, was believed to have been carried out by a remotely piloted Predator aircraft armed with missiles in the early morning hours on Friday. On Saturday, a Central Intelligence Agency spokesman declined to comment on any raid that might have taken place. The agency is known to operate armed Predator aircraft, but the missions remain classified and are not generally acknowledged by the C.I.A.
Blair Jones, a spokesman for the White House, said Saturday that he had no information on the incident.
President
Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan mentioned the attacks during a meeting on Saturday with officials from the town of Sawabi, according to a local reporter. He was quoted as saying: "We are looking into it, as to who has done it. We are looking into it, that there were people who came from outside."
Thousands of tribesmen, led by a local parliamentarian, protested the killings on Saturday, chanting anti-American and anti-government slogans in the town of Khaar, the central administrative center of Bajaur.
After the rally dispersed, 800 to 900 men went on a rampage and attacked the offices of two nongovernmental organizations in the town, according to the local Pakistani reporter. The crowd looted computers from an American-financed aid organization, called BEST, and then torched the entire compound. The office of another Italian aid group, Intersos, was smashed and looted before the authorities intervened.
On Saturday, the Pakistani security official described some of the intelligence surrounding the airstrike. He said that a dinner at which Mr. Zawahiri was expected had been planned for Thursday night. A local cleric, Maulavi Liaqat, was at the dinner, but he left around midnight, the official said.
After the airstrike, Mr. Liaqat was again at the scene, and he had the bodies of the Arab militants pulled from the rubble and taken away, the security official said. A second cleric, Maulavi Atta Muhammad, took away the Pakistani militants, he said.
A second American official who acknowledged that Mr. Zawahiri had been the target of the strike said it was probably too soon to know for certain whether he had been at the scene. The American official acknowledged that intelligence was often imperfect, but said American operations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region reflected a continuing, intensive effort to track down Mr. Zawahiri,
Osama bin Laden and their followers.
In a radio interview last month, Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, retired, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, declined to discuss the raids in detail but said "there's an awful lot of pressure" on senior Qaeda leaders. "Whenever there's pressure, which means the more you talk, the more you move, the more you do anything, the more vulnerable you become," he said.
Admiral Redd also pointed out in the interview that Mr. bin Laden had not made a public statement in more than a year and said "there are a lot of theories" as to what that might mean. He declined to elaborate.
Pakistan has not granted American forces in Afghanistan the right to cross the border, even in pursuit of militants. President Musharraf has made a point of highlighting Pakistani security efforts to hunt down militant figures taking shelter in the lawless northwestern tribal region, but American officials have expressed frustration with a lack of progress.
Pakistan's government announced a potentially huge victory in the effort in March 2004, saying Mr. Zawahiri had been surrounded in a battle between Pakistani soldiers and militants in the tribal region. But the government later backed away from the statement, and within days there was a new taped message said to be from Mr. Zawahiri, calling for President Musharraf's ouster.
The hunt for Mr. Zawahiri has heated up again over the past six months and has been focused on the Bajaur district, the senior Pakistani official said. Unlike Mr. bin Laden, who has stayed out of public view, Mr. Zawahiri has been vocal, releasing several videotapes and audiotapes with messages for his followers and containing threats of further attacks on Western interests. He is also thought by intelligence officials to move around the region more than Mr. bin Laden does, making him somewhat easier to track.
Mr. Zawahiri has a wife who is a Pashtun from the Mohmand tribe and he has been known to visit her and their two children at the home of his father-in-law on the border between the districts of Bajaur and Mohmand, the official said. He is also known to have visited different parts of Bajaur where Arabs and other militants are active in training and mounting insurgent operations across the border into Afghanistan.
In Damadola, the village hit by the missiles, a local member of Parliament, Sahibzada Haroon Rashid, said he saw a drone aircraft surveying the area hours before the attack and was later awakened by huge explosions.
He said that three houses had been hit by the airstrikes. "The houses have been razed to the ground," said Mr. Rashid, who said he had visited the scene. "There is nothing left. Pieces of the missiles are scattered all around. The impact of the explosions have been huge. Everything has been blackened in a 100-meter radius."
Damadola has been the focus of previous security operations as well. The Pakistani authorities carried out an operation in the village in April 2004 against a cleric, Maulavi Faqir Mohammad, whom they blamed for giving sanctuary to militants. The maulavi has been at large since, but turned up on Friday and spoke at the funeral of the civilian dead, denouncing the strike, local residents said. He left the area immediately afterward.
In a speech he gave to townspeople in Sawabi, President Musharraf warned that aiding militants was dangerous.
"If we harbor foreign terrorists, those who carry out bomb blasts throughout the world, then remember that our future is not good," he said. "People should not side with foreign militants, they should tell us about them so we take action against them," he said.
He did not directly criticize the United States for the attack, and it was left to Pakistan's Foreign Ministry to protest the infringement of the country's sovereignty. "Our armed forces have undertaken large-scale operations against the foreign militants, and it remains our responsibility to protect our people and territory from outside intrusion," the ministry said.
Saturday was the second time in two weeks that the Pakistani government has condemned what was thought to be an American attack on its soil. Eight people, including women and children, were reported killed on Jan. 7 when missiles destroyed the house of a local cleric in North Waziristan close to the Afghan border. Pakistan lodged a strong protest with coalition forces on Monday, but said it was still investigating whether the missiles had been fired from Pakistani airspace or from Afghan territory.
In December, a man that American officials identified as Al Qaeda's operation commander, Hamza Rabia, was killed in North Waziristan by what witnesses said was a missile fired by a remotely piloted aircraft. The C.I.A. also refused to comment on that attack.
There have been a number of incidents of civilian deaths in failed or misdirected American attacks in Afghanistan and along the border with Pakistan. In July 2002, dozens of Afghans at a wedding party were killed in an American bombing raid. Witnesses said the guests were firing celebratory rounds into the air, while the Americans said they had come under antiaircraft fire. After that incident, the United States appeared to restrict air assaults for a time.
In December 2003, nine children and a 25-year-old man were killed in a strike from a Predator in Hutala, a village in a remote area of southern Ghazni Province. The intended target, a Taliban supporter who was suspected of being behind several attacks on foreign aid and construction workers, was not among the dead and may have not been in the village at the time.
The American military command expressed regret for the killings and sent officers to the village to apologize. President
Hamid Karzai said he was "profoundly shocked" and demanded that the United States forces coordinate their attacks with the Afghan government in the future.
In Afghanistan on Saturday afternoon, suspected Taliban gunmen shot and killed a former Taliban minister, Mullah Abdul Samad Khaksar, outside his home in Kandahar, according to Afghan television reports and witness accounts. The attackers escaped on a motorcycle after pumping bullets into Mullah Khaksar's head and chest.
Mullah Khaksar was the first member of the Taliban government to defect and announce his support for Mr. Karzai's government, and he ran for a seat in Parliament in September. A spokesman for the Taliban, Qari Muhammad Yusuf Ahmadi, claimed responsibility for the killing and said that the same fate awaited all other former Taliban supporters of the new government.
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Angry protesters chant anti-U.S. slogans during a protest in Islamabad, Pakistan on Sunday, Jan. 15, 2006. Islamic groups staged nationwide protests Sunday against a purported CIA airstrike that Pakistan says killed innocent civilians instead of the apparent target, top al-Qaida lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahri. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)
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