Pakistan says U.S. drones kill senior Taliban figure

That number shot up to 117 in 2010 and then dropped the 46 last year. The strike that killed Nazir was the first of 2013.

The program has killed a number of top militant commanders over the past year, including al-Qaida’s then-No. 2, Abu Yahya al-Libi, who died in a drone strike in June on the Pakistani village of Khassu Khel in North Waziristan.

In August, another missile strike in North Waziristan killed Badruddin Haqqani, who has been described as the day-to-day operations commander of the Haqqani network, which has been blamed by the U.S. for carrying out some of the most high-profile attacks against American and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

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Associated Press writers Asif Shahzad and Rebecca Santana in Islamabad contributed to this report.

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