US drone strike leaves three dead in east Afghanistan
At least three people have lost their lives in a US drone strike in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar, a local official says.
Nangarhar Provincial police spokesman, Hazrat Hussain Mashraqiwal, told Pajhwok Afghan News that the incident happened in Nangarhar’s Ghani Khel district on Saturday night.
The US drone attack killed three militants, including one Pakistani national, and left another militant injured, Mashraqiwal added.
Meanwhile, Ghani Khel district chief, Haji Khaksar, added that the wounded militant was also a Pakistani national, saying that the incident had no civilian casualty.
The US has been conducting drone operations in Afghanistan over the past years. The aerial campaign has sharply intensified, with at least 80 US drone strikes hitting the war-torn Asian country in October alone.
The United States regularly uses drones for airstrikes and spying missions in Afghanistan, as well as in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt near the Afghan border, among other places.
Washington claims that the airstrikes target militants, but local sources say civilians have been the main victims of the attacks. The United Nations also says the US drone attacks are “targeted killings” that flout international law.
Earlier this month, an American whistleblower, known as the New Snowden in media, leaked a set of secret documents to the Intercept, revealing the details of the US drone campaign in different countries, including Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan.
Based on the documents, Washington’s drone program, which began after 9/11 attacks in New York under the pretext of fighting terrorism, “suffers from an over-reliance on signals intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and - due to a preference for assassination rather than capture - an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects,” wrote the Intercept.
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