Word: mehsuds
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...Pakistan are concerned, there is now "credible evidence" that Baitullah Mehsud, the murderous head of the Pakistani Taliban, was killed in a CIA-operated drone strike last Wednesday, Aug. 5. Conclusive proof, said Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik, could come only from a DNA test on what remains of Mehsud (the drone strike reportedly severed his body in half). However, the remote village in South Waziristan where the attack took place is dominated by the Taliban and other militants, difficult to access...
...that inaccessibility has made the details of the battle to become the successor to Mehsud equally hard to pin down. Through the weekend, speculation has been rife that Hakimullah Mehsud and Wali-ur-Rehman, two Taliban leaders tipped for the top slot, turned their guns on each other as the power struggle within turned bloody. Malik insisted that one of the men was dead. General James Jones, President Barack Obama's National Security Adviser, said that signs of internal dissension were encouraging. But on Sunday, Wali-ur-Rehman called a Reuters reporter familiar with his voice to assert that...
...been a successful few days in the war on terror. On Aug. 5 Baitullah Mehsud, leader of Pakistan's Taliban, was apparently killed in a strike by a U.S. drone. And on Saturday Aug. 8, Indonesian authorities reported that Noordin M. Top, the country's most wanted terrorist, was probably killed during a police raid, ending a years-long manhunt for the Malaysian believed responsible for a string of bomb attacks in Jakarta and Bali in recent years. In a dramatic shootout broadcast on national TV, police surrounded and fired shots at a small house in Temanggung in central Java...
Baitullah himself rose to the top of the Pakistani Taliban after a long internecine battle with other commanders, like Abdullah Mehsud, a onetime detainee at Guanténamo Bay. Once he had reached the summit, Baitullah was able to keep fractious tribal commanders in line by sheer force of will. It helped that, after a 2005 truce with Pakistani authorities, he had the time and freedom to consolidate his leadership. Many counterterrorism analysts believe he also had the covert help of Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI. It helped, too, that the CIA's drone campaign was aimed primarily...
Much will depend now on what the Pakistani military does next. Since June, when the government of President Asif Ali Zardari announced the start of a major offensive against Mehsud, the military has confined itself to aerial attacks. Many officers are thought to be opposed to a ground campaign in difficult terrain against a united TTP. Mehsud's death gives the military the opportunity to go in for the kill. But another U.S. official worries that the Pakistanis will hold off and seek another truce. "There will be some [in the military] who say, 'Enemy No. 1 is dead...