Rockets Fired At Western Force Supplies In Pakistan

Hundreds of trucks with supplies for troops in Afghanistan have been destroyed around Peshawar this month.

JAMRUD, Pakistan (Reuters) -- Pakistani Taliban militants fired rocket-propelled grenades at a convoy of trucks taking supplies to Western forces in Afghanistan, wounding a woman, a government official has said.

The ambush was the latest in a string of attacks aimed at choking off supplies being trucked through the Khyber Pass from Pakistan's main port to Western forces battling the Taliban in landlocked Afghanistan.

Militants fired two rocket-propelled grenades at a convoy of more than 150 trucks as it set off from a supply-staging area on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Peshawar.

"One of the rockets fell in a parking lot while another hit a nearby house and wounded a woman," government official Fida Mohammad Bangash said in Jamrud, the main town in Khyber.

"The convoy appears to have been the target, but they missed," he said, adding the trucks continued on their way through the pass to the border at Torkham.

Bangash said about 170 trucks took supplies through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan on December 16.

The route from Peshawar through the Khyber Pass to Torkham is the most important supply line for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

About 75 percent of the vehicles, parts, weapons, fuel, water, and food needed to sustain more than 60,000 Western troops moves through the pass and a second overland route to the south between Pakistan's Quetta and Kandahar in Afghanistan.

Many Pakistani truckers have halted taking the supplies because of the violence including the destruction of about 300 trucks parked at depots near Peshawar in five attacks last week.