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Thank you Capt. Tom and Dog for your suggestions.

I searched the GEONames database for the place names you suggested, or anything remotely resembling those names. I searched an area two degrees square, or 104 miles on a side, centered on Wana. These are the results.

Shin Warsak -- Already included in list of place names, above.

Daza Gundai -- Most likely "Ghundai", meaning mountain or hill, but still no hits on Daza Ghundai or anything like it.

Kallu Shah -- The only thing close was "Kala Rajan Shah, but it was substantially outside the 30 mile "box" to the NE of Wana, while newspaper reports place Kallu Shah as being in the Azam Warsak area, which is to the SW. So, imo, we have no hit on this one either.

Ghaw Khawa -- A big zero. Nothing on GEONames and nothing on Google.

Khari Kot -- Indeterminate. Google had zero hits, but the GEONames database had four possible hits. The most likely was Karim Kot (14 km, 9 miles, NW at 320° from Wana), but I have a low confidence that I correctly identified the Khari Kot named in the article. However, if you think that's the one, I'll add it to the table.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO FIND THE PLACE NAMES OF THIS REGION?

There are several reasons.

The people of the region speak Pashto, which is written in Arabic script. Translation of place names to English is not done by translating the meaning of the word to its English equivalent, but rather by converting each sound (or phone) to the romantic letters that approximate that phone. In many cases the phones are so complex that conversion requires the use diacritic characters. There is no exact science to making such a conversion, so for any given place name, you may find as many as a dozen different spellings.
Population density in this area is very low and averages (easily) below 10 person per square kilometer and in many areas, it goes below 1 person per square kilometer. This means that many populated places have so few residents or are so far in the outback, that they often are overlooked or ignored.
The GEONames database is not the problem here. That database is the same database our military relies on for geographic intelligence. It contains nearly 6 million entries of foreign place names covering over 200 categories and types of names. It has, perhaps, the best database search feature available on the internet.

--Boot Hill

I had trouble myself looking for these places. What I thought was happening was they were using locality names which are not cities or towns.

For example if the battles were taking place in New York City, and you gave locations of the action like , lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, most foreigners not familiar with New York City sections, may not relate to those places,and think they are outside the city.

I think you have it right it is a language difference in describing the locations.

Remember these battles are in several places in Waziristan and not just at the more famous one where AL Zawahiri was thought to be. - Tom