U.S. and Pakistan Give Conflicting Accounts of Drone Strike
25, 2018
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — One day after an American drone strike killed a leader of the militant Haqqani network in northwestern Pakistan,
United States officials on Thursday rejected a claim by Pakistan that the strike had targeted an Afghan refugee camp.
statement yesterday that U.S. forces struck an Afghan refugee camp in Kurram Agency yesterday is false,"
said Richard W. Snelsire, the United States Embassy spokesman in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.
A statement by Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday condemned the strike and maintained
that it had "targeted an Afghan refugee camp in Kurram Agency" — an assertion that the United States rejected on Thursday.
American officials said that there were no Afghan refugee camps in Kurram, a remote tribal region
straddling the border with Afghanistan, where they said Wednesday’s drone strike had taken place.
The Pakistani military said in a statement that the drone strike had singled out a house in one such settlement in the province’s Hangu District,
and that Afghan refugees were present in the settlement.
The United Nations refugee agency also said it had not been operating in the tribal regions of Pakistan since 2005.
A Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said
that the confusion about the location had arisen as the targeted house was in a settlement at the junction of the Kurram, North Waziristan and Hangu regions.