US missiles from drone kill 8 militants in Pakistan

Eight militants were killed in a US missile strike in northwest Pakistan yesterday, security officials said, in the third such attack on the Taliban's tribal strongholds in 24 hours.
The unmanned drone targeted the lawless region of North Waziristan, a Taliban bolthole where Washington says Islamist fighters are hiding out and plotting attacks on Western troops stationed in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Northwest Pakistan is seeing a surge in US strikes, with seven reported this month as the United States tries to stem the flow of militants waging a deadly insurgency against about 100,000 foreign troops stationed across the border.
"It was a US drone attack which targeted a compound in Norak area in North Waziristan," a security official in the region said.
"The death toll in the strike is eight militants including three Arabs, one Uzbek, one Chechen and three local militants," he added.
Another security official confirmed the attack and toll, telling AFP that Taliban rebels were holding a meeting in the compound about 25 kilometres (15 miles) east of district hub Miranshah at the time of the attack.
"It is not clear if there was any high-value target," he said.
On Tuesday, two successive strikes from the pilotless spy planes in South and North Waziristan killed a total of 12 militants.
The first strike killed five rebels at the compound of a low-level Taliban commander in South Waziristan's Sara Rogha, a stronghold of former Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in a US drone strike in August.
Hours later, more missiles pounded militants associated with an al-Qaeda-linked network in North Waziristan, apparently killing seven Afghan Taliban at a house on the outskirts of Miranshah.
The US military does not, as a rule, confirm drone attacks, but its armed forces and the Central Intelligence Agency operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy pilotless drones in the region.
The fatalities are impossible to verify independently because the targets are deep in Taliban-controlled territory.
Islamabad publicly opposes the US missile attacks, with 60 such strikes killing more than 580 people since August 2008.
But the Pakistani government welcomed the death of Taliban warlord Mehsud on August 5.
Rahimullah Yusufzai, an expert on the tribal areas, said that the spike in US missile attacks could show increased cooperation between the two nations.