Maulana Abdul Aziz warned that Pakistan faces a “bloody revolution” unless sharia law is announced nationwide. A bomb blast at the home of another cleric left at least nine dead.
Rights observers in Afghanistan say US forces may have been directly involved in the mass slaying of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners in 2001 who were sent across the desert in shipping containers.
At least 25 were killed in Afghanistan’s Logar province after a truck loaded with explosives hidden under firewood was remotely detonated. Of the dead, only four were police; 16 were schoolchildren.
Some 4,000 US Marines moved into villages in Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province—a remote area that is at the center of the country’s opium cultivation.
At least 10 militants were killed in another presumed US drone strike on Pakistan’s tribal areas. There have been an estimated 35 US strikes since last August, killing over 340 people.
Pakistani jet-fighters ran bombing raids over North Waziristan tribal region, killing seven people near Miramshah. Taliban militias have imposed a ban on any tribal councils holding peace talks.
Pakistan’s government is establishing a Sufi Advisory Council, with an aim of combating extremism by promoting Sufism and its pacifistic vision of Islam.
Militant cleric Sufi Mohammed, who brokered the failed Swat Valley peace deal, has been arrested and transferred to a “safehouse” in Peshawar, an unnamed official told Italy’s AKI news service.
At least 45 were killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan’s South Waziristan region. Those killed had been attending a funeral for others killed in a US drone strike earlier in the day.
Missiles fired from a presumed US drone hit a compound in Ghurlama village, near Wana, in the Birmal subdivision of Pakistan’s South Waziristan district, killing 11 suspected militants.
Militants bombed mosques in two cities in Pakistan, killing at least eight people, including a cleric who was an outspoken critic of the Taliban.
Pakistan’s army said it has arrested senior associates of the radical Islamist cleric Sufi Mohammad, who brokered the failed peace-for-sharia deal in the Swat Valley.
