Reuters – Pakistani security agents denied on Monday that an American al Qaeda spokesman wanted in the United States for treason had been arrested, saying there had been confusion over the identity of a detained suspect. Some Pakistani officials had said on Sunday that Adam Gadahn, a California-born convert to Islam with a $1 million U.S. bounty on his head, had been arrested on the outskirts of the city of Karachi. But a senior government official and two security agents said on Monday the suspected al Qaeda operative picked up in Karachi was not Gadahn. Read article
Bloomberg – Missile attacks by U.S. drone aircraft in northwest Pakistan since 2004 have killed as many as 1,216 people, one third of them civilians, according to a report by a Washington-based think tank. The unmanned aircraft based in neighboring Afghanistan have carried out 114 raids in the past six years, killing up to 849 militants, the report by the New American Foundation said. Since Jan. 1, drones have attacked Taliban based in the South Asian country’s tribal areas 18 times, it said. The minimum number of people who likely died in the total attacks is 834, of whom 549 were thought to have been militants. The data was collated from media reports. Read article
Ahlul Bayt – According to Ahlul Bayt News Agency (ABNA), the captured ringleader of the Jundallah terrorist group, Abdolmalek Rigi, was scheduled to meet US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke at the Manas Air Base for talks on waging an insurgency against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a journalist says. Rigi had planned to meet a high-profile US official at the Manas Air Base near Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek. Read article
Telegraph – India and Pakistan’s first talks since the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks ended in acrimony as each accused the other of harbouring terrorists and tolerating human rights abuses. The meeting in New Delhi was regarded as the first step in rebuilding trust between the long-standing enemies, but their foreign secretaries revealed significant differences continued. India’s foreign secretary Nirupama Rao said dialogue “holds tremendous potential” but progress had been repeatedly “thwarted” by acts of terrorism. She went into the talks “conscious of the large trust deficit between the two countries,” she said. Read article
Reuters – At least 10 people, including an Islamist militant commander, were killed on Thursday in a bomb blast in a remote village market in Pakistan’s Khyber region on the Afghan border, officials said. The attack apparently targeted a commander of Lashkar-e-Islam militant group based in the region. The group is not part of Pakistan’s main Taliban alliance but espouses the same hard-line interpretation of Islam. Read article
Pakistan Daily – The US military is planning to set up new training centres inside Pakistan where American special operations trainers would work with Pakistani forces close to the Afghan border battle zone, a senior defence official said. The new centres would supplement two already operating in Pakistan, and they would be used to accelerate and expand the training of Pakistani forces considered key to rooting out Al Qaeda leaders hiding along the mountainous border, the official said. Read article
UPI – There are more private security contractors from Xe, formerly Blackwater, operating in Islamabad than capital police, a religious leader said. Maulana Fazal-ur-Rahman, the leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a Deobandi political party in Pakistan, said there were as many as 9,000 Xe contractors working in Islamabad, compared with just 7,000 capital police, Pakistan’s News International reports. Read article
Associated Press – As of Friday, Feb. 5, 2010, at least 901 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to an Associated Press count. The AP count is seven more than the Defense Department’s tally, last updated Friday at 10 a.m. EDT. Read article
AFP – The US drone war in Pakistan has made gains in annihilating Taliban and Al-Qaeda commanders, but the reliance on the unmanned, remotely controlled aircraft risks fanning Islamist violence. While tens of thousands of US troops are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, their presence is unwelcome in ally Pakistan and drone strikes have become the main combat tactic against militants on the ground. Read article
BBC – The United States may provide Pakistan with a dozen unarmed drone aircraft to help strengthen its fight against the Taliban, US defence officials say. Defence Secretary Robert Gates told a Pakistani television channel that the plan was being considered. The use of armed drones by US forces in strikes against militants in Pakistan has led to huge anti-American feeling. Read article
BBC – The Pakistani Taliban have denied their leader Hakimullah Mehsud was killed in a US missile attack in the north-west. At least 10 suspected militants died when missiles were fired at a target in the North Waziristan region near the Afghan border, Pakistani officials say. Read article
Guardian – 3,021 people killed in terrorist attacks in 2009 – a 48% rise, according to Islamabad thinktank. A record number of Pakistani civilians and security forces died in militant violence last year as the country reeled from an onslaught of Taliban suicide bombings that propelled it into the ranks of the world’s most perilous places. Pakistan saw 3,021 deaths in terrorist attacks in in 2009, up 48% on the year before, according to a new report by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS), an Islamabad-based defence thinktank. Researchers counted a total of 12,600 violent deaths across the country in 2009, 14 times more than in 2006. Read article
Associated Press – A senator who’s just visited Pakistan says Pakistan’s military may be considering a move into the militant stronghold of North Waziristan. Sen. Joe Lieberman says the Pakistani army is on the move and there’s a possibility the U.S. will see activity in that volatile northern region. Read article
AFP – The US drone war in Pakistan has made gains in annihilating Taliban and Al-Qaeda commanders, but the reliance on the unmanned, remotely controlled aircraft risks fanning Islamist violence. While tens of thousands of US troops are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, their presence is unwelcome in ally Pakistan and drone strikes have become the main combat tactic against militants on the ground. Read article
Voice of America – A suicide bomber has struck a military facility in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, killing at least four soldiers and wounding 11 others. This is the second incident in the region within a month, fueling fears Taliban militants are expanding their subversive activities. Meanwhile, tribal sources and local officials say that at least 13 suspected militants were killed and many others wounded in back to back U.S. drone attacks in Northwestern Pakistan near the Afghan border. Read article
Associated Press – As of Friday, Jan. 8, 2010, at least 868 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to an Associated Press count. The AP count is the same as the Defense Department’s tally, last updated Friday at 10 a.m. EDT. Read article
Press TV – The US is helping the Pakistan-based Jundallah militants to enter Iran through the Persian Gulf and carry out terrorist acts in the country, a report said Wednesday. The United States has given a vessel to members of the Jundallah terrorist group to travel in the southern Iranian waters, an informed source told Basirat website, with close ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). Read article
Salem News – News out of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India reports massive corruption at the highest levels of government, corruption that could only be financed with drug money. In Afghanistan, the president’s brother is known to be one of the biggest drug runners in the world. In Pakistan, President Zardani is found with 60 million in a Swiss Bank and his Interior Minister is suspected of ties to American groups involved in paramilitary operations, totally illegal that could involve nothing but drugs, there is no other possibility. Read article
The Peninsula – Of the 44 Predator strikes carried out by the American drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 12 months of 2009, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of around 700 innocent civilian lives. Read article
BBC – At least 88 people have been killed by a suicide bomb attack at a volleyball court in the troubled north-west of Pakistan, local police say. Police chief Ayub Khan said the bomber drove towards a field where people were watching a match, before detonating a load of high-intensity explosives. The attack happened near Lakki Marwat, close to North and South Waziristan. Read article
Reuters – A suspected U.S. drone aircraft killed at least two militants in Pakistan’s North Waziristan on Thursday, a security official said. The strike, on a house where militants were believed to be hiding, also wounded several people, said the official. Read article
The Nation – America’s B-52 heavy bomber aircraft, which can carry nuclear and conventional ordnance with worldwide precision navigation capability, was again seen hovering over Pakistan’s tribal areas on Sunday. The flights of US B-52 bomber, along other spy planes, continued over Fata for last several weeks, causing panic among the locals. Read article
Reuters – A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a Shi’ite Muslim hall in the Pakistani part of disputed Kashmir on Sunday, killing at least 5 people, police said. The blast in Muzaffarabad city demonstrated the challenges facing U.S. ally Pakistan, which is struggling against al Qaeda-linked militants and is under pressure from Washington to help stabilize Afghanistan, where a Taliban insurgency is raging. Read article
The National – Few people by now can be unaware of Blackwater, later known as Blackwater Worldwide and now as Xe. The private security agency formed in 1997 and based in North Carolina is owned by Erik Prince, a former member of the US Navy Seal special forces, and has long-standing links with both the CIA and the FBI. Its presence in Pakistan has been an open secret for some years. The investigative journalist and writer Jeremy Scahill, an authority on Blackwater and author of the bestselling Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, revealed last month that it has been there since 2006. He says Blackwater is being employed for covert ops, essentially intended to target high-value al Qa’eda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, but it has also assisted in providing information for drone attacks and has kidnapped suspects and transported them covertly to the US for interrogation. Read article
Press TV – A bomb blast in northwestern Pakistan has killed at least five people and wounded more than 20 others with no group claiming responsibly for the attack. The bomb was detonated near a security checkpoint on a busy road in the city of Peshawar on Thursday. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack thus far, a press TV correspondent reported. Read article
