A Global Hawk UAV is seen flying over an unidentified location in this US Air Force image.
Prominent international human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith was impressed by the 16-year-old boy who wanted to draw attention to civilian deaths caused by US drone strikes in Pakistan.
Tariq Aziz had volunteered to take pictures of people killed by the remotely piloted aircraft to help Stafford Smith highlight what he calls illegal killings.
Three days later, on October 31, he and his 12-year-old cousin were themselves killed by a drone missile strike in the North Waziristan region on the Afghan border, Stafford Smith said.
For the veteran lawyer, the deaths highlighted major flaws in the CIA-run drone campaign, which US officials say is invaluable in the war on militants.
“What they did to Tariq was absolutely disgusting,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Top Al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, has died, SITE reported
Al-Qaeda has announced the death of Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, regarded as its number three and Osama bin Laden's one-time top money man, in what would be a major blow to the global terror network.
US monitoring groups said the death of Yazid, who was most recently the leader of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and its liaison with the Taliban, was announced by the group in a message to jihadist websites on Monday.
In Washington, a US official said there was "strong reason" to believe that the Egyptian militant was dead and that he was killed recently in Pakistan's tribal areas, a hotbed of Islamist militants.
"In terms of counterterrorism, this would be a big victory," the official said.
Officials in Washington and Islamabad were scrambling to make sense of communications intercepts and other intelligence that seemed to indicate that Mr. Mehsud might have been killed in the strike. By Thursday evening, American officials said they were growing increasingly confident that the Taliban leader was dead.
The missile struck a house in the remote village of Zanghara, in South Waziristan, about 1 a.m. Wednesday. Local residents reached by telephone confirmed that one of the wives of Mr. Mehsud, the leader of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, was among those killed. Her name or age could not be confirmed.
Five others, including four children, were reportedly wounded in the missile strike.
The compound where the attack took place belonged to Ikramuddin Mehsud, a local tribal elder whose daughter is Baitullah Mehsud’s second wife.
The strike by a drone early Wednesday morning hit a compound in the remote village of Zanghara, in South Waziristan. Village residents said that day that one of Mr. Mehsud’s wives had been killed in the attack and that several children had been wounded.
Pakistani officials publicly condemn these attacks, but they have privately given their blessing to the strikes in the country’s tribal areas, in part because the missile attacks increasingly have focused on Mr. Mehsud’s network.
Baitullah Mehsud, the self-professed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, has vowed to to send more suicide bombers to kill US troops in Afghanistan.(The Mehsuds are a large warrior Pashtun tribe renowned for never being pacified by the British forces.) The US homeland security chief is calling on Pakistan to strike back against Taliban fighters on its border with Afghanistan.
The US and NATO say a truce between the Taliban and Pakistan in the North-West Frontier province has already led to more fighting.
Still, they cautioned that it may be weeks before they are certain, and they may never gain access to the remote location in South Waziristan to perform DNA tests.
“There is reason to believe that reports of his death may be true, but it can’t be confirmed at this time,” said an American official with access to classified intelligence reports.
Mr. Mehsud and his military network have been blamed for a wave of violence across Pakistan, including the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister.
The militant leader also seemed to take pleasure in taunting Pakistani officials and holding news conferences to demonstrate the inability of officials in Islamabad to rein in his network.
Mr. Mehsud pledged to attack Washington, but American officials did not take the threat seriously. Still, his network is believed to have close ties to Qaeda leaders in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The C.I.A. made killing Mr. Mehsud one of its top priorities this year, partly at the urging of Pakistan’s civilian government. Pakistani officials, including President Asif Ali Zardari, had complained that the campaign of missile strikes by American drones was killing only militants responsible for killing American troops in Afghanistan.
Since then, the State Department has offered a reward of as much as $5 million for Mr. Mehsud. The C.I.A. also began trying to track his daily movements, and American intelligence officials believed on several occasions that they had almost killed him.
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Past news :- Baitullah Mehsud believed to responsible for Bhutto assassinations.
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Insider story : Pakistan Taliban.Peace talks between the Pakistani government and Taliban rebels have collapsed as the government refused to pull its troops out of its tribal border region with Afghanistan. Inside Story asks what the failure of the talks will mean for Pakistan.
