From US puppet Pakistani Taliban to US puppet Pakistani govt.: We will take revenge

Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) says it will carry out revenge attacks against Pakistani government officials, following the killing of its leader in a US assassination drone strike.

“We will target security forces, government installations, political leaders and police,” Asmatullah Shaheen, head of the Pakistani Taliban leadership council, was quoted by Reuters as saying on Friday.

He added that the Pakistani army and government installations in Punjab Province are among the main targets of the Taliban. Punjab is the political stronghold of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Pakistan publicly denounces the US killer drone attacks as a breach of its sovereignty. However, authorities acknowledge in private that Islamabad largely supports the airstrikes.

“Pakistan has full information about drone attacks,” Shaheen stated.

The Taliban member said Pakistan is “a slave of America… an American colony.”

On Thursday, the TPP council unanimously selected Mullah Fazlullah to replace Hakimullah Mehsud, who was killed along with several other people in a US drone attack in the North Waziristan tribal region on November 1.

Washington says the drone strikes primarily kill Taliban militants who threaten the US-led international forces in neighboring Afghanistan, but casualty figures show that Pakistani civilians are often the victims of the attacks.

UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism Ben Emmerson recently said that the Pakistani government had reported at least 400 civilian fatalities as a result of the US drone strikes since 2004.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, however, says between 2,528 and 3,644, including hundreds of civilians, have died in US drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004.