Waziristan is a mountainous region covering the former FATA agencies of North Waziristan and South Waziristan which are now districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Waziristan covers some 11,585 square kilometres (4,500 sq mi). The area is populated by ethnic Pashtuns. It is named after the Wazir tribe. The language spoken in the valley is Pashto, predominantly the Waziristani dialect. The region forms the southern part of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which is now part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Mīrāmshāh or Mīrānshāh is a small town that is the administrative headquarters of North Waziristan, Pakistan. Miramshah lies on the banks of the Tochi River in a wide valley surrounded by the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains. It is located at an elevation of about 930 metres (3,050 ft), 17 kilometres (11 mi) from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The nearest city in Pakistan is Bannu, about 55 kilometres (34 mi) to the east, while the nearest city across the border in Afghanistan is Khost, 60 kilometres (37 mi) to the northwest.
Sirajuddin Haqqani is a military leader hailing from Afghanistan, who, as deputy leader of the Taliban, had previously overseen armed combat against American and coalition forces, reportedly from a base within North Waziristan in Pakistan. Sirajuddin Haqqani is the leader of the Haqqani network, a sub-set of the Taliban organisation, and scion of the Haqqani clan. Haqqani is currently deputy leader under the Taliban supreme commander, Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada. However, it was later acknowledged on 7 May 2020 that late Taliban founder Mohammad Omar's son Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob had become head of the Taliban military commission, thus making him the insurgents' new military chief.
The Battle of Mirali was a bloody military engagement occurred between 7 October and 10 October 2007 and involved Taliban militants and Pakistani soldiers around the town of Mirali, Pakistan, the second biggest town in the semi-autonomous region on the border with Afghanistan.
Mir Ali or Mirali is a town in North Waziristan, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Pakistan. Mir Ali is located in the Tochi Valley, about 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) east of Miramshah, 40 kilometres (25 mi) west of Bannu, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and 70 kilometres (43 mi) southeast of Khost city, Afghanistan. Mir Ali has an altitude of 674 metres (2,211 ft). In October 2007, the battle between Taliban militants and Pakistani armed forces killed 175 civilians in Mirali.
This is a list of aviation-related events from 2008:
Qari Hussain Ahmad Mehsud was a top lieutenant in the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the organizer of the group's suicide bombing squads. He was a cousin of Hakimullah Mehsud.
Between 2004 and 2018, the United States government attacked thousands of targets in Northwest Pakistan using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) operated by the United States Air Force under the operational control of the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division. Most of these attacks were on targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghan border in Northwest Pakistan. These strikes began during the administration of United States President George W. Bush, and increased substantially under his successor Barack Obama. Some in the media referred to the attacks as a "drone war". The George W. Bush administration officially denied the extent of its policy; in May 2013, the Obama administration acknowledged for the first time that four US citizens had been killed in the strikes. In December 2013, the National Assembly of Pakistan unanimously approved a resolution against US drone strikes in Pakistan, calling them a violation of "the charter of the United Nations, international laws and humanitarian norms."
Maulvi Nazir was a leading militant of the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan. Nazir's operations were based in Wana.
Hakimullah Mehsud, born Jamshed Mehsud and also known as Zulfiqar Mehsud, was a Pakistani militant who was the emir of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). He was deputy to commander Baitullah Mehsud and one of the leaders of the militant group Fedayeen al-Islam prior to the elder Mehsud's death in a CIA drone missile strike.
The Operation Rah-e-Nijat was a strategic offensive military operation by the unified command of Pakistan Armed Forces against the Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP) and their extremist allies in the South Waziristan area of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas that began on June 19, 2009; a major ground-air offensive was subsequently launched on October 17. It became the integral part of the war in Western fronts which led the encirclement and destruction of Taliban forces in the region, although the Taliban leadership escaped to lawless areas of neighboring Afghanistan.
23 June 2009 Makin airstrike was an attack launched by United States drones on a funeral procession in the city of Makin in South Waziristan, Pakistan. The attack targeted a funeral procession of militants killed earlier in the day in a prior similar strike by drones. About 60 people were reported killed in what is considered perhaps the deadliest strike since the drone attacks started. Other sources claimed up to 83 people were dead. There were reports that Baitullah Mehsud was in the area but escaped unhurt while his deputy Qari Hussain was killed, although this has been disputed. Hussain later phoned reporters to prove he was still alive. The drones fired missiles when Sangeen Khan, an Afghan commander belonging to Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, was holding a meeting soon after the funeral of an associate of Baitullah Mehsud.
Hafiz Gul Bahadur is the leader of a Pakistani Taliban faction based in North Waziristan. Upon the formation of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in December 2007, he was announced as the militant group's overall naib amir under Baitullah Mehsud, who was based in South Waziristan, but has largely distanced himself from the TTP due to rivalries with Mehsud and disagreements about the TTP's attacks against the Pakistani state.
Makin or Makeen is a small town in South Waziristan, Pakistan, located on the Y-junction between Sararogha and Wana, just north of the town of Ladha and south of Razmak in North Waziristan. It is mainly populated by members of the Mehsud tribe. The Pakistani military has called it "the nerve center" of the Pakistani Taliban.
The Datta Khel airstrike was an American airstrike carried out on 17 March 2011 in Datta Khel, North Waziristan that killed 44 people and led to widespread condemnation in Pakistan. Sherabat Khan Wazir, a top commander of Hafiz Gul Bahadur's Taliban faction, was killed in the strike, and in response Bahadur threatened to end the peace deal struck with the Pakistani government almost four years earlier. The airstrike was part of a long series of drone attacks in Pakistan carried out by the CIA and United States military. It occurred just two days after diyya, a form of compensation paid to a victim's family under Islamic law, was paid for the release of U.S. CIA operative Raymond Allen Davis, signaling a resumption of U.S. activity after a several week hiatus while Davis' pardon on murder charges was being negotiated.
Khalid Mehsud was the deputy leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and the leader of the Mehsud faction of the Taliban in South Waziristan, Pakistan. He was formerly the chief of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan's South Waziristan chapter. Pakistani intelligence officials reported that he had been killed along with other 12 militants on 25 November 2015 in a drone strike carried out by the United States. Azam Tariq, spokesperson for the Sajna faction of TTP denied that he had been killed. He was killed in a drone strike on 8 February 2018 in North Waziristan, near the border with Afghanistan.
The 2014 Bannu Bombing was a bombing attack by the Taliban that killed twenty six Pakistani soldiers. Thirty-eight other people were injured as a result of the bombing.
Operation Zarb-e-Azb was a joint military offensive conducted by the Pakistan Armed Forces against various militant groups, including the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, al-Qaeda, Jundallah and the Haqqani network. The operation was launched on 15 June 2014 in North Waziristan along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border as a renewed effort against militancy in the wake of the 8 June attack on Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, for which the TTP and the IMU claimed responsibility. As of 14 July 2014, the operation internally displaced about 929,859 people belonging to 80,302 families from North Waziristan.
On 16 December 2014, six gunmen affiliated with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) conducted a terrorist attack on the Army Public School in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. The militants, all of whom were foreign nationals, comprising one Chechen, three Arabs and two Afghans, entered the school and opened fire on school staff and children, killing 149 people including 132 schoolchildren ranging between eight and eighteen years of age, making it the world's fourth deadliest school massacre. A rescue operation was launched by the Pakistan Army's Special Services Group (SSG) special forces, who killed all six terrorists and rescued 960 people.
