Home
Discover Islam
Quran Recitations
Lectures
Fatwa
Articles
Fiqh
E-Books
Women
Boys & Girls 
Ramadan
Fatwa Audios
Month of Mercy
Women
Eed Al- Fitr
Food Recipes
Videos
Pakistan has stopped the United States from using an air base in the southwest of the country to launch drone strikes against 'militant' groups, according to the country's defense minister.
Ahmed Mukhtar told journalists on Wednesday that US officials had been told to leave the Shamsi base in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, Pakistani state media reported.
The UK's Financial Times newspaper quoted Mukhtar as saying that Pakistan had ended US drone flights out of base, long reported to have been used for a campaign of air strikes targeting Taliban fighters in the northwest region along the Afghan border.
"No US flights are taking place from Shamsi any longer. If there have to be flights from the base, it will only be Pakistani flights," Mukhtar said.
Islamabad has long publicly opposed the missile attacks as a violation of its sovereignty, but has in private given support including intelligence to help target Taliban members.
Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said that the Shamsi air base had been given to the US under Parvez Musharraf, Pakistan's president from 1999 to 2007.
"When the US drone attacks intensified in the tribal areas, [they] caused growing anger in Pakistan and the government was consequently put on the back foot," Aljazeera correspondent said.
Ties between the countries, strained since the killing of two Pakistanis by a CIA agent in January, suffered a further setback when US special forces killed Osama bin Laden in a secret raid that Pakistani officials said further breached its sovereignty.
Hyder said the operation against Bin Laden had put Pakistan in an embarrassing position, prompting them to "tone down the American military presence on the ground".
Pakistan's army has drastically cut down the number of US troops allowed in the country and set clear limits on intelligence sharing with the United States, reflecting its anger over what it sees as continuing US interference in its affairs.
Washington had been asked to remove all its infrastructure from the Shamsi air base, the Financial Times cited an unidentified Pakistan official as saying.
The official, though, said, no drone flights had taken off from the base since 2009.
US drone strikes have been stepped up since American President Barack Obama took office.
PHOTO CAPTION
A Predator surveillance drone equipped with missiles.
Al-Jazeera
Prayer Times
Prayer times for Doha, Qatar 
