U.S. and Pakistan Give Conflicting Accounts of Drone Strike<br />25, 2018<br />ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — One day after an American drone strike killed a leader of the militant Haqqani network in northwestern Pakistan,<br />United States officials on Thursday rejected a claim by Pakistan that the strike had targeted an Afghan refugee camp.<br />statement yesterday that U.S. forces struck an Afghan refugee camp in Kurram Agency yesterday is false,"<br />said Richard W. Snelsire, the United States Embassy spokesman in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.<br />A statement by Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday condemned the strike and maintained<br />that it had "targeted an Afghan refugee camp in Kurram Agency" — an assertion that the United States rejected on Thursday.<br />American officials said that there were no Afghan refugee camps in Kurram, a remote tribal region<br />straddling the border with Afghanistan, where they said Wednesday’s drone strike had taken place.<br />The Pakistani military said in a statement that the drone strike had singled out a house in one such settlement in the province’s Hangu District,<br />and that Afghan refugees were present in the settlement.<br />The United Nations refugee agency also said it had not been operating in the tribal regions of Pakistan since 2005.<br />A Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said<br />that the confusion about the location had arisen as the targeted house was in a settlement at the junction of the Kurram, North Waziristan and Hangu regions.
