Taliban Leader in Pakistan Is Reportedly Killed
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — American and Pakistani officials said Friday they were increasingly convinced that an American drone strike two days earlier had killed Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan’s enemy No.1 and the leader of its feared Taliban movement.
While Mr. Mehsud was a pivotal figure who held together the loose and disparate network of militants in Pakistan, experts said his death would not end the violent Taliban insurgency, its ties to Al Qaeda or its push for Pakistani territory.
Tavernise and Mark Mazzetti
Mr. Mehsud, a militant in his 30s who made attacks inside Pakistan his top priority, was blamed for the assassination of the former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and scores of suicide bombings, including at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed more than 50 people last September.
The drone attack was the result of months of closer cooperation by the Pakistani and American intelligence agencies. But his death would raise questions about how far the Pakistani authorities are now willing to go to crush the remnants of the Pakistani Taliban — and how hard the Obama administration would continue to push them. The Taliban insurgency across the border in Afghanistan was not expected to be affected.
The Mehsud network in fact appeared to have weak links, as officials confirmed Friday that the intelligence about Mr. Mehsud’s whereabouts had come partly from informants inside the Mehsud network who had been bought off by Pakistani spies.
Pakistanis who knew Mr. Mehsud said he had become less of an active operator since a serious kidney illness had become more acute. Several analysts also noted a tendency for military officials to focus excessively on one person — like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, whose death in 2006 did nothing to halt the violence in Iraq.
“The war will not finish,” Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi, former director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency, said in an interview. “The rest of his group is still intact; the man who prepared the suicide bombers is still alive. Army action is still necessary to take them out.”
The missile strike on Wednesday, from a C.I.A. drone, took place as Mr. Mehsud, a diabetic, was on a drip infusion for his kidney ailment, according to two Taliban fighters reached by telephone on Friday.
He was being tended to by one of his wives, the fighters said, and according to Pakistani security officials who had viewed American video of the attack, apparently from the drone, they were together on the roof.
They were both at the house of his father-in-law, Mulvi Ikramuddin, in the village of Zanghara, in South Waziristan. Mr. Ikramuddin’s brother, a medical practitioner, was treating him, the Taliban fighters said. link....
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