Afghan Border

A U.S. missile slammed into a suspected Taliban camp in a lawless Pakistani tribal region, intelligence officials and Taliban commanders said, killing as many as 14 people, nearly a week after a similar strike reportedly took out the group's leader. The missile hit a compound in Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud's stronghold, South Waziristan, near the Afghan border, intelligence officials said.

Washington has called Waziristan the most dangerous place on Earth. Former Pakistani general Ali Muhammad Jan Aurakzai knows why. Aurakzai led troops against Taliban militants in the Pakistani region from 2001 to '04, confronting a ferocious enemy able to ambush and then suddenly disappear down goat paths or melt away into warrens of mud-hut villages. Two major military offensives in recent years failed to rub them out.

In the enveloping darkness of a starless summer night, the sizzle-thump of incoming Taliban rockets is swiftly answered by the percussive boom of outgoing U.S. artillery. But the American troops manning this base in eastern Afghanistan know that their elusive nighttime foe can slip away to sanctuary in Pakistan, just 20 miles away.

At least 62 people suffocated in the back of a truck packed with illegal migrants, and dozens were rescued unconscious after Pakistani police acting on a tip opened the vehicle Saturday near the Afghan border. Rasool Bakhsh, a senior Pakistani police official in the city of Quetta, said the truck carrying a shipping container entered Pakistan from Afghanistan and was headed for Iran. He said most of the victims were Afghans.

A suicide bombing destroyed a mosque in Pakistan near the Afghan border Friday, killing at least 50 people and wounding more than 100, officials and witnesses said. Scores of people were missing in the rubble. The attack, near the town of Jamrud in the Khyber tribal area, came on the holiest day of the Muslim week, as the mosque was packed with worshipers. In the aftermath of the blast, prayer caps, cellphones and sandals lay scattered on the rocky ground.

A missile attack Sunday near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, believed to have been carried out by a U.S. drone aircraft, killed at least eight people, Pakistani officials said. The strike, the first of its kind since a high-level Pakistani military delegation visited the United States last week, suggested that the Obama administration intended to press ahead with a campaign of targeting militants in Pakistan's tribal areas.

In a significant concession to Islamic militants battling the central government, Pakistani authorities Monday agreed to allow the imposition of Sharia, or Islamic law, in a onetime tourist destination just 100 miles northwest of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. The move, the main provision of a cease-fire formally announced Monday by both sides, is likely to set off alarm bells in Washington.

A missile strike apparently carried out by one or more U.S. drones flattened a home in the South Waziristan region near the Afghan border, killing local and foreign militants, Pakistani intelligence officials said today. Sources did not agree on the number of dead, but it appeared to be at least 20, with several others wounded.

What was believed to be a U.S. drone aircraft fired a missile at a house in the militancy-plagued Pakistani region of North Waziristan on the Afghan border, killing two people, security agency officials said. A security agent and a Taliban militant confirmed the strike and the death toll at the house in the village of Chashma. There was no immediate information about the identity of those killed. Security has deteriorated sharply in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, seven years after U.S. soldiers and their Afghan allies drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan in the weeks after the Sept.