Up to 30 insurgents have been killed in fighting in Afghanistan before this week’s parliamentary elections, Nato and Afghan officials say.
The military alliance said that up to 23 militants were killed in action in southern Helmand province on Tuesday and three in eastern Wardak province yesterday. An Afghan official said four Taleban were killed yesterday in southeastern Zabul province.
There were no reports of casualties among joint Nato-Afghan forces. Attacks and clashes are rising amid an allied offensive aimed at suppressing the continuing Taleban insurgency.
The Taleban has vowed to target polling stations and warned Afghans not to participate in what it calls a sham vote. The United Nations envoy for Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, said the upcoming elections for the Lower House of Parliament “are not going to be perfect”. But, he expressed hope that they would be better than last year’s presidential vote which was marred by allegations of widespread fraud and irregularities.
Drone aircraft unleashed two missile attacks in a lawless tribal region on the Afghan border, making September the most intense period of United States strikes in Pakistan since they began in 2004, intelligence officials said. The stepped-up campaign that included yesterday’s strikes is focused on a small area of farming villages and mountainous, thickly forested terrain controlled by the Haqqani network, a ruthless American foe in Afghanistan, US officials say.
There is some evidence the network is being squeezed as a result, one official says.
American officials said the airstrikes were designed to degrade the Haqqanis’ operations on the Pakistani side of the border, creating a “hammer-and-anvil” effect as US special operations forces raided fighters across the frontier in Afghanistan.
The missiles have killed more than 50 people in 12 strikes since September 2 in the Pakistani region of North Waziristan, according to an AP tally based on Pakistani intelligence officials’ reports. Many struck around Datta Khel, a town of about 40,000 people that sits on a strategically vital road to the Afghan border.
US and Pakistani intelligence officials said most of this month’s strikes had targeted the forces of Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani, a former anti-Soviet commander and his son who were battling American forces in eastern Afghanistan.
The raids targeting the group in Afghanistan are led mainly by the Joint Special Operations Command. Such raids across Afghanistan are now more frequent than at any previous time in the nearly nine-year war, with 4000 recorded between May and August as special operations numbers were boosted by troops arriving from Iraq.
The raids had focused on the Haqqanis for the last two years, officials said. A senior American intelligence official in Afghanistan said the US had reports that Haqqani commanders were under pressure from the operations. “We’re seeing from some of the raids that some of the more senior guys are trying to move back into Pakistan,” the official said.
The official cautioned that the Haqqanis often employed military disinformation. And so far, the official said, neither the special operations raids nor the missile strikes on the Pakistan side of the border appeared to have degraded the militants’ ability to fill the ranks of the slain.
But sometimes, the US official said, the replacements were far less competent than their predecessors. Last month also saw a lull in US airstrikes, until an attack on September 2 began days of repetitive missile attacks.
Until now, the highest number of airstrikes inside Pakistan in a single month had been the 11 launched in January 2010 after a suicide bomber killed a Jordanian intelligence officer and seven CIA employees at a base in Afghanistan.
US officials do not publicly acknowledge the missile strikes. Critics say innocents are also killed, fuelling support for the insurgency.
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