(Previous Incident Code: Ob256 )

Many civilians were reported injured in an alleged US drone strike on Miranshah in the border province of Waziristan in Pakistan on January 10th 2012. According to media sources, the operation targeted Al-Qaeda, where between one and six of its militants were reported killed in the attack.

Human rights activists in Pakistan and abroad have reported significant civilian casualties as a result of the strikes, according to the Guardian.

According to local media, the missiles struck a house around two kilometers from Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, shortly before midnight.”It was an unusually big bang. Since it was extremely cold I didn’t leave the house, but could see a house on fire,”In the morning, we saw a modest mud house had been destroyed.” A witness said.

The Guardian said a U.S. official confirmed there had been a missile strike in the region, but didn’t specify the location.

This attack ended the longest pause of the Obama drone war in Pakistan (55 days).  Reuters initially cited Pakistani officials as saying the victims were ‘foreign fighters of Arab and possibly also Uzbek extraction‘.

Ten days after the strike Reuters reported that the attack killed Aslam Awan, 25, (aka Abdullah Khorasani), who it described as a Pakistan-born senior external operations operative for al Qaeda. Pakistan’s The News reported that a Saudi national may also have died. According to a local tribesman: “A guest from the holy land (Saudi Arabia) living in a ramshackle house was killed on the spot but his wife and a son staying in the same room survived”.

The News later claimed that according to its sources in the security establishment this strike – and one on February 9 2012 – ‘was carried out on a tip off provided by the Pakistani intelligence community’. A Pakistani security source told Reuters they were joint operations. This strike ‘ made use of Pakistani “spotters” on the ground’, the agency reported.