The spokesman for the provincial “disaster management authority,” which mostly deals with influxes of refugees from the assorted offensives, confirmed that 18,000 people had arrived at the camp seeking aid.

A Khyber government said that the number who had fled the violence was actually quite a bit larger, and was probably above 20,000 including a number of civilians who fled to stay with relatives in the city of Peshawar.

The Khyber Agency is a key part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas as it is the route through which much of NATO’s traffic travels into neighboring Afghanistan. The offensives, meant to protect those supplies, tend to rile up insurgent factions, however, putting the route in even more peril.

The convoy was returning from an offensive against a “banned militant organization” in Aka Khel territory when they were attacked near a military checkpoint. In addition to the slain, three other members of Pakistan’s security forces were wounded in the shootout.

The Pakistani military’s on-again, off-again offensives against the Khyber Agency have killed enormous numbers of civilians as well as combatants, and have driven a number of tribes into militant factions, which are all called Taliban even though they are largely unaffiliated with one another or the former Afghan government.

In addition to the Khyber violence, Pakistan’s government reported unnamed militants on motorcycles attacked and killed a prominent anti-Taliban tribesman in the Khyber-Pakhtunwhah Province.

Most of the dead were members of a tribe that opposes the Taliban and often supports the Pakistani government.

Khyber is a major transit area for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and yet is also a major center for militant groups. NATO’s fuel supplies are often the target of attacks. In 2009, Khyber was besieged by Pakistani forces after a militant attack, forcing as many as 100,000 civilians to flee. US drone strikes have often killed dozens in the region, as have Pakistani air force bombings.

This is because throughout the first decade of the Afghan War, materially all of the supplies for the NATO occupation have come into Afghanistan by way of the southern route, shipping into Pakistan and traversing the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.

The move to the far more expensive northern route reflects growing fear that, as the US and Pakistan see their ties go south, the Pakistani government may soon decide that the massive convoys of fuel and weapons heading north into Afghanistan are no longer welcome.

The supply lines have been briefly cut in the past, mostly reflecting militant violence in Khyber and Pakistan’s inability to secure the winding route for such enormous amounts of traffic. Interestingly though it may be US inability to maintain friendly ties, not Pakistan’s security woes, which cuts the route.

Rather, Lt. General Asif Yasin Malik now says that all 13 were killed by mortar fire from nearby soldiers who were called in to provide support after the ambush. The insurgents apparently killed no one, but the military’s own response killed 13 of its own men.

Lt. Gen Malik also claimed that the troops arrested a number of militants, but exactly how this could be is unclear, as the indications are that virtually the entire Frontier Corps forces on the scene was killed in the friendly-fire incident.

It is unclear what group was involved in the clash, but Pakistan has been targeting the banned Lashkar-e Islam movement in recent days, which is strongly active in Khyber and the surrounding areas.

Officials say that the convoy was returning from a mission when it was attacked, not far from Peshawar. They also claimed a number of militants were slain in the attack, but exactly how many or who they were is unknown.

Two of the slain were a colonel and a captain in the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force the Pakistani government uses in the tribal area. The troops were searching for militants in the area before the ambush.

Indications are that a number of the casualties were accidental, when the troops sought to return fire with a mortar which jammed and exploded on them. So far no group has taken credit for the attack.

The major strikes hit in the Spin Darang village, and were said to be targeting a meeting among suspected Lashkar-e Islam members, a group with a strong presence in Khyber which, like virtually every other faction of Pashtuns in the tribal areas, is often referred to as a “Pakistani Taliban” faction.

It is unclear what prompted the Obama Administration’s sudden interest in spreading its drone war into Khyber, far north from its usual targets in North and South Waziristan, nor is it immediately apparent why such moves were taken against the Lashkar-e Islam, a group which has clashed with the Pakistani government but does not appear to be a major player in Afghanistan.

It may simply be a case of escalation for escalation’s sake, as the Obama Administration struggles to claim some measure of progress in the nearly decade long occupation of Afghanistan and seems to be lashing out in odd directions in an effort to turn those claims into something at least vaguely credible.

Officials disagreed on whether this was the first or second such strike against Khyber, as there were some conflicting reports of an attack in May. Pakistan’s own military had been launching massive numbers of strikes in the region at the time, however, so it was never conclusively tied to the US.

The timing of the attack, as the US ratchets up demands on the Pakistani government to “do more” in its tribal areas, suggests that the administration is escalating across the region. President Obama had also sought Pakistani permission to launch drone strikes in Balochistan, but was rebuffed.

Escalating into Khyber also brings the drone strikes, once completely restricted to the North and South Waziristan Agencies, closer to the major city of Peshawar. Strikes too near the city, as with the proposed strikes in Quetta, would likely spark a major backlash among the Pakistani public.

The LeI, one of an almost innumerable number of militant groups across the tribal areas, caught the Pakistani government’s ire when they attacked a NATO supply convoy. Pakistan also claimed the group was planning to launch suicide attacks in Peshawar.

NATO has been relying on the Khyber Agency as a route for supplies to its war in Afghanistan for years, and the route is becoming all the more important as flooding renders alternative routes through Pakistan impassable.

But the civilian toll of the attacks is likely to fuel even more resentment against both the Pakistani government and against the US-led war in Afghanistan, which precipitated the attack.

On Sunday when it happened, Pakistani military officials angrily denied local reports of civilian deaths and claimed that everyone killed was a “militant,” part of a group massing to attack a military checkpoint.

Local officials told a different story, however. The Pakistani jets bombed the home of a Pakistani soldier, killing five members of his extended family and leveling the structure. The “massing” of people were locals trying to rescue anyone still trapped in the rubble, and the bulk of the deaths came when the jets returned and bombed the site again.

The latest from the national government seems to confirm what the locals were saying all along, and as the locals insist the village’s families are disproportionately pro-government and many have soldiers in the military, the reason for the attack is perplexing, to say the least. Officials say they have paid out some $125,000 in “compensation” for the killings.

As this story of civilian deaths comes to an unhappy ending, another looms on the horizon. The missile attack against Miramshah late last night, which officials lauded as killing “four suspected militants,” is reported by locals to have actually killed 13 people, all civilians, including two children.