An article appearing in Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post said that “the CIA is using an arsenal of armed drones and other equipment provided by the US military to secretly escalate its operations in Pakistan by striking targets beyond the reach of American forces based in Afghanistan.”
According to the article, this is part of the Obama administration’s plan to merge covert CIA operations with military firepower.
“The US military has quietly been providing Predator and Reaper drones, as well as other weaponry, to the CIA in an effort to give the agency more capacity to carry out lethal strikes in Pakistan,” it quoted American officials as saying.
The report comes as Washington officials on Wednesday said that the US military operated twenty-two non-UN-sanctioned attacks against Pakistan in September, the highest monthly figure so far.
On Saturday, two separate non-UN-sanctioned US drone attacks killed 25 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region along the Afghan border.
Islamabad has reacted angrily to the air strikes, calling them a violation of its sovereignty and in retaliation to the surge in the cross-border attacks, Pakistan has closed its borders with Afghanistan to NATO supply trucks.
Though Washington claims the strikes target militants, most of the victims of the attacks have been civilians.
Almost a thousand Pakistanis have lost their lives in more than 100 US drone attacks during the past two years.
Source: Press TV