Pakistani civilians "terrorized" by U.S. drone attacks – report

PanARMENIAN.Net - Civilians are being "terrorized" 24 hours a day by CIA drone attacks that target mainly low-level militants in north-west Pakistan, a U.S. report says, according to BBC News.

Rescuers treating the casualties are also being killed and wounded by follow-up strikes, says the report by Stanford and New York Universities.

Drone attacks are thought to have killed hundreds of militants in Yemen and Afghanistan as well as Pakistan.

U.S. President Obama has said the targets are "on a list of active terrorists".

Senior al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan.

But the scale of civilian casualties has been difficult to assess because independent media and researchers are denied access by the authorities to the tribal areas near the Afghan border.

In one of the most notorious attacks of recent years, tribal elders and local traders were among more than 40 people killed when two drones attacked a car carrying at least four militants at Datta Khel in North Waziristan in March 2011.

A controversial aspect of the US policy is that drone attacks are carried out not by the military but by the Central Intelligence Agency. Pakistan is not a zone of armed conflict, unlike neighboring Afghanistan.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has defended the policy, saying that the US will continue to defend itself.