Another US drone strike has torn through Datta Khel, in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency today, killing five people, all of whom were identified by officials as “suspected Taliban,” though none of them were named.
The attack destroyed a house, and the five people were within. The suspicion of their being Taliban appears, as usual, to be based on the idea that anyone the US strikes hit probably was guilty of something.
It comes in the wake of another report released warning of large number of innocent civilians have been hit in the US attacks, and then passed off as “suspects” by Pakistani officials not eager to look to deeper into it.
That the targets were labeled “Taliban” specifically also suggests that there is more information sharing with the US, and that the drone war is not even nominally focused on “high-profile” al-Qaeda linked targets, but any Taliban they might conceivably find.