(Previous Incident Code: Ob318 )

After a 42-day pause, a strike reportedly killed up to seven people and wounded up to four when two missiles hit a house at 3am, leaving bodies that were ‘badly damaged and beyond recognition’. The exact location of the strike was not clear. According to a resident, the attack hit a house in Miranshah and militants took six coffins to a village called Chashma, 3km (2 miles) to the east. However Pakistani security officials and Pashtun tribesmen said two missiles hit a mud house in Chashma.

Reports on the number of victims varied, with the New York Times reporting that at last three people were killed, BBC claiming a death toll of four people, Jagran adding that four people were killed and two others wounded while Pakistan claimed that four others were wounded. Several sources put the death toll higher, such as AFP which reported that six suspected militants were killed and two others wounded and Reuters reporting that seven people were killed and four wounded.

Pakistani security officials initially reported it was not immediately clear if the victims were the intended targets. Militants reportedly immediately sealed off the area and recovered bodies from the debris. Bur local resident Bashir Dawar told Reuters: ‘Tribesmen started rescue work an hour after the attack and recovered seven bodies.’

The injured were reportedly moved to a nearby hospital and said to be in a critical condition; some reports said that four people died at the scene and three people died of their injuries in hospital.

Wali ur Rehman, second-in-command of the Pakistan Taliban (TTP), was later confirmed as one of the victims by Pakistani security officials and locals.

Rehman and his men carried out multiple attacks against the Pakistani state, killing soldiers and civilians. An unnamed Pakistani intelligence officer told the FT: ‘The Taliban will feel very vulnerable after this attack… This is crippling for their top command structure.’

Among other sources, Reuters claimed that three others killed in the attack were senior Taliban militants. CNN reported that Rehman’s close aide Fakhar ul Islam (aka Fakhr i Alam) was killed and two Uzbek nationals whose identities their sources didn’t know. According to The Nation, Nasarullah, Shahabuddin Adil and Nasiruddin (aka Naseer Ud Din) were among the other victims (while this post is no longer available on their website, it is archived in the Airwars hard archive).

The attack came six days after President Obama unveiled a new drone policy. He defended the use of drones and admitted civilians had died in strikes, saying that civilian casualties were a necessary risk. He announced new guidelines governing covert drone strikes, and briefing documents released by the White House summarised five rules controlling lethal actions. Strikes could only target individuals who posed ‘a continuing, imminent threat to US persons’. White House spokesman Jay Carney read out a portion of the speech related to standards for action in response to questions from reporters after the strike. According to CNN he said the US ‘will continue to take strikes against high value al Qaeda targets, but also against forces that are massing to support attacks on coalition forces’.