LAHORE: Conflicting reports continue to pour in from the trouble-ridden South Waziristan tribal agency about the fate of the most wanted chief of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, Commander Baitullah Mehsud amidst claims by the Pakistani authorities that he had been killed in an American predator attack along with his second wife and counter claims by his trusted lieutenant Hakeemullah Mehsud that the TTP chief was safe and alive.
The Pakistani ministry of interior has officially confirmed the death of Baitullah in the August 5, 2009 US predator strike along with his second wife in Zangara village of Laddha subdivision in South Waziristan tribal agency. Although the Pakistani authorities have so far failed to retrieve his dead body, the government circles in Islamabad say they have acquired credible intelligence information that the TTP ameer was laid to rest on Wednesday along with his wife and father in law, Ikramuddin, whose house had been targeted by the American predator. The official circles further say Baitullah’s damaged Prado jeep has also been found from the compound of the Zangara village which was the prime target of the US drone attack, thus confirming his presence in the area at the time of the deadly strike.
According to the Pakistani intelligence sources, a US predator missile fired into the Zangara housing compound at 1 a.m. on August 5 massacred seven of the family’s bodyguards and 26 others, including the Taliban leader’s young wife. They add that Mehsud himself was reportedly killed when a second missile was fired into the Prado jeep he was using in an attempt to escape. But Hakeemullah Mehsud, one of the most powerful commanders in the Waziristan tribal region, had described reports of Baitullah’s death as ridiculous, saying they were the handiwork of the intelligence agencies.
In a phone call to the Associated Press on Saturday, Hakeemullah Mehsud said some outside power was spreading rumors of Mehsud’s death in the press as a means of trying to get him to come forward, thus becoming a target for a missile. Hakeemullah said the Taliban would present some proof of Baitullah Mehsud’s continued existence in the coming days. Asked if Baitullah Mehsud could call the AP, Hakeemullah said it was not possible at the moment.
But there are those in the intelligence circles who believe that Hakeemullah’s denial was aimed to buy time until a new leader is chosen by the Pakistani Taliban as the TTP leadership is divided over who should become the next chief. Hakeemullah, who controls fighters in the Orakzai, Kurram and Khyber regions in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, is regarded as one of the leading contenders to replace Baitullah. For the time being, the Pakistani Taliban have withheld an announcement about the death of their leader, pending nomination of his successor, amid intelligence reports that the TTP council of elders met for the third day running on Friday at a secret location in Ludda in the volatile South Waziristan to nominate a new leader.
On the other hand, the Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Interior Minister Rehman Malik have confirmed the death of Baitullah on Friday. If the Pakistani authorities are to be believed, Baitullah was killed almost four months after the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) had declared him the most wanted al-Qaeda-linked Pakistani terrorist and announced [on March 26, 2009]a $5 million bounty for information leading to his arrest. He was perhaps the most important example of a tribal Taliban fighter who at first fought in Afghanistan and cooperated with the Pakistani Army, but then turned against his own country, unleashing a vicious campaign of violence in the name of spreading the rule of Islam.
The most wanted terrorist in Pakistan by the time of his apparent death in his mid-30s, Baitullah rocketed to notoriety in just three years as the leader of the Pakistani Taliban and became a key figure in Al Qaeda’s regional operations. His turn against the Pakistan state was seen by many in the Pakistani establishment as a direct result of his close alliance with al-Qaeda, in particular with Dr Ayman al-Zawahri, the second in command of Osama bin Laden, as well as the powerful Afghan Taliban leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who has a close working connection to al-Qaeda.
The news of Baitullah Mehsud’s possible death was in the air since August 5th drone attack that according to initial reports had killed his second wife and father-in-law. On the night of August 6, information started coming out of the Mehsud territory in bits and pieces that he too had been killed, and throughout the day it remained the only topic of discussion within Pakistan. Initially, the Pakistan government was quite reluctant to openly confirm the news. In his uncharacteristically cautious remarks Interior Minister Rehman Malik said he had information but no evidence to suggest that the TTP leader had in fact been killed. A few hours later, the first confirmation of sorts came from the Pakistani foreign minister.
“Yes my intelligence sources have confirmed that he has been killed,” foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters in Islamabad. But he qualified it by saying that it needed to be authenticated through other means. Subsequent media reports suggested that Baitullah might have been buried in Nargosha area of Shabikhel in South Waziristan alongwith his second wife and father in law. Whether he has been killed or not, one thing is sure that the drone strike to take out Baitullah was the outcome of a joint Pak-US intelligence operation that may indicate a new level of trust between the often mutually suspicious intelligence agencies of the two countries.
Baitullah Mehsud was once a minor figure in the small Shabi Khel branch of the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan, an inhospitable mountainous territory that fiercely resisted efforts by the armies of the British Empire to conquer it. The son of a prayer leader, he had a basic religious education where he grew up in Miram Shah, the capital of North Waziristan. It was probably there that he was first recruited to fight in Afghanistan alongside the Taliban during their period in government in the late 1990s. He served with the Taliban at the Kabul airport, according to a senior Afghan security official. After the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, he returned to his native Waziristan, accompanied by thousands of Afghan Taliban and hundreds of foreign Qaeda fighters who settled in North and South Waziristan.
As the Pakistani Army began operations in Waziristan in 2004, Baitullah was promoted by the Taliban leadership to command the fighters from the Mehsud tribe. But Pakistani officials still considered him someone they could deal with, and in February 2005 they signed a much-criticized peace deal under which the army pulled back its forces, giving Baitullah Mehsud freedom to operate in South Waziristan. He quickly expanded his forces and power, and by December 2007 he had been named the leader of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the umbrella movement that commands most of the Taliban groups throughout Pakistan’s tribal areas and the adjoining Swat Valley.
His growth had brought Mehsud back into confrontation with the Pakistani military. In 2007, he took about 250 Pakistani Army soldiers hostage when they tried to pass through his tribal territory. The hostage-taking came just days after the government laid siege to militants in the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007, and was apparently in retaliation for the government’s crackdown. Mehsud began attacking Pakistani military and intelligence targets in the tribal areas and beyond, and was behind almost all of the scores of suicide bombings that have occurred in Pakistani cities since then, according to Army Chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
Baitullah Mehsud, who preferred to be called a Pakistani Talib, used to represent a growing threat to both the Pakistani government and to the American hopes for tracking down Osama bin Laden and dismantling his al-Qaeda network. His meteoric rise from a comparatively little-known figure in South Waziristan to the head of a full-fledged Taliban movement in Pakistan has not only had serious repercussions for local security, but also for the Global War on Terror. He was an obscure figure on the tribal scene until late 2004, when he had filled the vacuum left by another tribal militant leader, Commander Nek Mohammad, to become the new hero of tribal youth who used to view with contempt the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and were opposed to the Pakistan government’s siding with the US in the war against terror. Nek too was killed in June 2004 in South Waziristan in a laser-guided missile attack, carried out by the Afghanistan-based US Allied Forces.
The shadowy Taliban commander’s swift rise to notoriety landed him on 2008’s TIME Magazine’s list of “100 most influential people in the world” and made Newsweek the same year to title him “more dangerous than Osama bin Laden”. Baitullah had allegedly transformed the badlands of South Waziristan on the Pak-Afghan tribal belt into al-Qaeda’s most vital redoubt. The $5 million FBI head money announced by the FBI had placed Baitullah just below the fugitive ameer of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Mohammad Omar in terms of his weight to the Taliban movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The FBI bounty for Mullah Omar is $10 million and that for Osama and Zawahiri $25 million each. The Obama administration’s move against Baitullah was largely aimed at dissuading his 25000-plus private army to join hands with the Taliban militia of Afghanistan headed by Mullah Omar who had announced to launch a major spring offensive against the NATO forces bases in Afghanistan.
Baitullah had emerged as the biggest menace for Pakistan attacking soft and hard targets in the tribal areas as well as across Pakistan. He was the most significant leader to emerge from the Pakistani Taliban in recent years. He was rumoured to be close to al-Qaeda and to Mullah Omar, rumoured to have had a hand in the murder of Benazir Bhutto, rumoured to be behind any number of bomb, gun and suicide attacks that have terrorised the population. He had become the main plank between al-Qaeda and several terrorist groups within Pakistan drawing cadres from all of them and forging them into a well-knit terrorist force. He considered himself safe in the craggy mountain redoubts of South Waziristan and so far all attempts to get to him through ground extraction operations had failed.
In the final analysis, he had become the centre of gravity which needed to be hit because he managed from that central position to expand the zone of irregular war, a combination of insurgency and terrorism, and forced the security forces to fight several small wars on the periphery. Many analysts in Pakistan believe that his death is a success but does not represent a war won, which is yet far off and perhaps years away. They are of the view that the greatest battle will to be to win back the predominantly youthful hearts and minds that his perverted view of the world and of Islam had turned to dark thoughts and dark ways. Pakistan should win that battle to truly win the war.
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