MIRANSHAH, Pakistan, Feb 17, 2010 (AFP) - A US drone strike killed at least four Islamist insurgents Wednesday at a compound close to the Afghan border in Pakistan's militant-infested tribal belt, security officials said.
The attack was the third since Sunday in North Waziristan district, a stronghold of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and Haqqani network known for staging attacks across the border on US and NATO troops fighting the Taliban.
Pakistani officials and residents said the aircraft fired two missiles into a militant compound in Tabi Tolkhel village, just five kilometres (three miles) from the border with the Afghan province of Khost.
"According to initial reports four militants were killed and two wounded," a security official said, requesting anonymity.
A local administration official confirmed the toll and said it was a US drone strike targeting a compound belonging to a Taliban commander.
The building was used as a guesthouse for visiting Taliban militants operating across the border in Afghanistan, another security official said.
Khost was the scene of a suicide attack in December, when a Jordanian double agent infiltrated a US base and blew himself up, killing seven CIA employees in the deadliest attack on the US spy agency in 26 years.
The Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud appeared in a video alongside the Jordanian Al-Qaeda bomber, and Washington appears to have stepped up its drone war in Pakistan's northwest tribal belt since the suicide attack.
A drone strike on Monday about 20 kilometres from the Khost border killed three militants, security officials have said, while seven insurgents were killed Sunday in a US raid near North Waziristan's main town, Miranshah.
Pakistani and US officials increasingly believe Mehsud was killed in a January strike in the northwest, although the Taliban insist he is alive.
The US drone programme targets Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants in the semi-autonomous northwest tribal belt, which Washington calls the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda and the most dangerous region on earth.
Officials in Washington say the strikes are a vital tool and have killed a number of high-value targets including Mehsud's predecessor Baitullah Mehsud, but the bombing raids fuel anti-American sentiment in Muslim Pakistan.
More than 780 people have been killed in the US strikes in Pakistan since August 2008, with a surge in the past year as US President Barack Obama puts Pakistan at the heart of his fight against Al-Qaeda.
Washington is pressuring Islamabad to do more to dismantle militant border sanctuaries, as it struggles to battle the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan, where more than 110,000 US and NATO troops are based.
About 15,000 foreign and Afghan troops are locked in one of the biggest offensives since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, targeting a stronghold of the insurgency in a district of Helmand province in the Afghan south.
