Spotlight on North Waziristan

View U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan in a larger map.

The big news yesterday: an al-Qaeda commander involved in providing explosives for the Jordanian doctor who killed himself and seven CIA officers and contractors in late December 2009 at a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan was killed on March 8 by a drone strike in Miram Shah, the main town in the Pakistani tribal agency of North Waziristan. Hussein al-Yemeni, who apparently had ties to some of the most well-known militant groups in the region and abroad — the Haqqanis, the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban, and al-Qaeda in Yemen — is the seventh key militant leader to be droned so far in 2010, according to our drones database.

Nearly all of the drone strikes in Pakistan this year have been in North Waziristan, and the leaders the drones have killed underlines the mish-mash of militants that operate in the tribal agency. A Punjabi Taliban commander and the head of the sectarian militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi who was wanted in the 2006 bombing of the U.S. consulate in Karachi died in late February. Siraj Haqqani’s younger brother Muhammad was killed a few days earlier (though there is some debate about whether he was actually involved with the militant movement). Abdul Haq Turkistani, described as an al-Qaeda linked militant and leader of a "radical Uighur group" called the Turkistani Islamic Party, died in Tappi, a few miles east of Miram Shah, in mid-February. A Jordanian Taliban commander who was a bodyguard for Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, al-Qaeda’s current number three, was killed in January. And of course, the drones’ biggest target this year, the chief of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan Hakimullah Mehsud, is now believed to be dead from injuries sustained in a strike in mid-January.

Given the militants of various stripes and affiliations who have been killed in North Waziristan this year alone, it’s not surprising, then, that more than half of all drone strikes reported since 2004 have taken place in that tribal agency. The chart below shows the breakdown of strikes by agency.

*March 18, 2010

There are several key points worth noting. The first is that the number of strikes in South Waziristan doubled from 2008 to 2009, and only 3 of the 26 in that agency that year happened after August 5, 2009 when the first TTP chief Baitullah Mehsud was killed in Zanghara, a small hamlet in South Waziristan. Sixteen of the 26 strikes in South Waziristan in 2009 were described in press reports as targeting Baitullah personally.

The Pakistani military offensive in South Waziristan also appears to have deterred the CIA from targeting any militants in the south last fall; after operations began there on October 17, 2009, not a single Agency missile was fired on the southern side of the Waziristan border, according to media reports. This halt was reportedly at the request of the Pakistani military, and as the operations pushed fleeing militants into North Waziristan, drone strikes there have gone up. This, along with the slew of recent captures of Taliban leaders in Pakistan, adds to the data points suggesting a growing degree of cooperation between the U.S. and the Pakistani government.

And where the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, is holed up is anyone’s guess. None of the media accounts of the drone strikes has reported him as the target. CIA director Leon Panetta told the Washington Post that bin Laden might be in North Waziristan (where there have been 65 reported drone strikes in the last six years) or the northern tribal areas (where there have been far fewer), but there hasn’t been a confirmed sighting of the terrorist leader since 2003. He seems to have vanished like a wraith.