A US drone fired a pair of missiles at a house in Datta Khel, in North Waziristan Agency today, killing at least five people and wounding an unspecified number of others therein.
As usual, none of the slain were named, beyond Pakistani “sources” calling them all suspected militants. There was some hope that one of the dead was a “high-value target,” albeit one similarly unnamed.
In the context of the US drone war, the bar for “high-value target” is so low that anyone who is slain who they actually have a name, or at least alias for has to be considered a high-value get.
The risk, of course, is that officials often proclaim these slain “high-value targets” dead only to have them emerge weeks or months later totally unharmed. Some top Pakistani Taliban members have been killed by the US multiple times and are believed to remain active.