Pakistani Taliban confirm leader’s death
Hakimullah Mahsud was injured in a missile strike by a U.S. drone last month. He is the group’s second leader killed in six months.

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan – The Pakistani Taliban confirmed Tuesday that their leader, Hakimullah Mahsud, died from injuries suffered in a U.S. drone missile strike last month, an attack that forces the insurgency to find a new leader for the second time in six months.

The death of Mahsud, engineer of a devastating series of suicide attacks and raids on markets, mosques and security installations across Pakistan in the latter half of 2009, gives the U.S. another major victory in its ongoing campaign of drone missile strikes against top Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders.

A drone strike last August killed Mahsud’s predecessor, Baitullah Mahsud. Missiles fired by drones over Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghan border have also killed 15 senior Al Qaeda commanders since 2004.

However, experts do not expect the loss of Hakimullah Mahsud, 28, to deal a fatal blow to the Taliban as it battles the government in the country’s northwest.

After Baitullah Mahsud’s death last summer, the Taliban was able to regroup and launch some of the deadliest attacks against Pakistanis in years, including the Oct. 10 commando-style raid on army headquarters in Rawalpindi, a sprawling, heavily guarded complex. The raid left 14 military officers and civilian workers dead.

“Obviously, it’s a great setback for them in terms of morale and organizational problems. There’s no doubt about it,” said Talat Masood, a security analyst and retired Pakistani general. “It will take time for them to recover, but they will definitely recover because they have support in those tribal areas.”

Pakistani authorities initially believed that Mahsud had been injured in a Jan. 17 U.S. drone strike that targeted two cars in North Waziristan, a largely Taliban-controlled district in the tribal areas.

However, Taliban sources said their leader was wounded in a drone strike Jan. 14 in Shaktoi, a village in South Waziristan near the North Waziristan border. A Taliban militant in the Orakzai district of Pakistan’s tribal areas said Mahsud suffered serious injuries to his legs and abdomen in the attack.

The sources said militants were trying to move Mahsud to Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, for treatment, but he died near the southern Punjab city of Multan, 460 miles northeast of Karachi. Taliban sources said he died Sunday, though that could not be confirmed.

Pakistani security and intelligence sources confirmed Mahsud’s death, but denied that he died in Multan and instead said he died somewhere in the tribal region.

The missile strike that killed Mahsud came amid a sharp rise in U.S. drone activity in the tribal areas following the Dec. 30 suicide bombing of a secret base in Khowst, Afghanistan, that killed seven CIA workers. Since that attack, at least a dozen drone strikes in northwest Pakistan have taken place, killing at least 100 people.

In a video released after the base attack, Mahsud was seen seated next to the Jordanian who carried out the bombing. The bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, said the attack he was planning would avenge the killing of Baitullah Mahsud.

The Taliban has not named Hakimullah Mahsud’s successor. However, the likeliest candidate appears to be Noor Jamal, the Taliban’s commander in the Orakzai and neighboring Kurram tribal regions and reportedly a close ally of Mahsud’s.

Believed to be in his 30s, Jamal was believed to be responsible for numerous kidnappings and slayings of pro-government tribal elders and informants. Also known as Mullah Tufan, Jamal ran a madrassa in the Togh Surai area of Orakzai before joining the Taliban.

Masood said he doubted that Hakimullah Mahsud’s deputy, Wali-ur Rehman, would be selected as the new Taliban chief because he is based in South Waziristan, where a large-scale offensive by Pakistani troops has decimated the Taliban’s infrastructure of camps, bunkers and compounds.

Orakzai and Kurram, meanwhile, have become more important to the Taliban because they are two key tribal districts to which militant leaders and fighters have been escaping after fleeing South Waziristan. Villagers in those districts say militants have begun patrolling areas they control and setting up checkpoints.

If Jamal becomes the Taliban’s new leader, Masood said, he likely will try to assert himself the way Mahsud did, by unleashing a wave of suicide bombings aimed at portraying the insurgency as a viable, deadly force undaunted by the military’s advances in the tribal areas.

The difference between the Taliban that Mahsud inherited and the one Jamal would oversee now is that the insurgents’ capability to train and equip attackers has been significantly damaged by the Pakistani military’s offensive in South Waziristan.

Many of the Taliban’s leaders and rank-and-file fighters were able to flee to neighboring tribal districts, but Pakistani troops now control most of South Waziristan.

“The question is to what extent do they have people ready to do this,” Masood said. “The more you clear militant sanctuaries and camps, the less ability they have to launch these attacks. They’d like to replicate what they did after Baitullah Mahsud died, but their capability is much less now.”

LA Times