Word: dadullah
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...latest victory in the war on terrorism took place on the night of May 11 in Helmand province, Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence had tracked Mullah Dadullah, thought to be the Taliban's top guerrilla commander, to a location near the border with Pakistan. By all accounts, what happened next was a model of surgical counterterrorism. When it was over, the Americans delivered Dadullah's corpse to Afghan authorities, who draped it in hot-pink sheets and displayed it for photographers in Kandahar, a ghoulish ritual that now attends the killing of any high-value terrorist target...
...Still, nobody's expecting that taking Dadullah out of the picture is going to end the sting of the Taliban - any more than the killing of Musab al-Zarqawi did in the case of the Iraq insurgency. A Taliban spokesman on Monday hailed Dadullah as a martyr, announcing that his brother had been appointed to take his place. "This is not going to slow down the Taliban jihad," spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said by telephone reading a statement attributed to the movement's fugitive leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar. That remains to be proved in the field, but the Iraq experience...
...appearance in the governor's mansion in Kandahar under a pink sheet, a wound on his head and his naked torso bloodied by two injuries, certainly dealt a psychological blow to the Taliban, for whom Dadullah has emerged as a powerful propaganda rallying point. His persona was used to recruit new fighters by the Taliban, with leaflets distributed only last week in Zabul province urging former mujahedin who had fought the Soviets in the 1980s to rally behind him. After losing a leg as a young mujaheed in the anti-Soviet jihad, Dadullah rose through the ranks of the Taliban...
...Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed Zaher Azimi said Dadullah's death, in the southern province of Helmand, could open a schism between rival Taliban commanders in the south and prompt defections from less committed fighters. "I think Dadullah's death will affect enemy ranks. We know he was the key Taliban figure who had the ability to center the Taliban efforts under a central command," he said...
...precise details of his death remain unclear. NATO said he was killed during U.S.-led operations when he "left his sanctuary into southern Afghanistan." Intelligence officials said he was killed in the southern province of Helmand. But it remained uncertain whether Dadullah had been killed by an air strike or in ground combat, Western military officials said...