Word: mehsuds
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...Hakimullah Mehsud - the ruthless leader of the Pakistani Taliban who has unleashed a wave of suicide bombings around the country in the past year - dead or alive? The mystery deepens. In mid-January, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence reported that Mehsud may have been hit by a U.S. missile strike in the sawtoothed ranges along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, a claim that was at once disputed by the Taliban. Then on Tuesday, Pakistani TV channels, quoting an unnamed Taliban commander, reported that Mehsud had indeed been injured by the missile, and that he lapsed into a coma and died...
...Some Taliban experts in Islamabad believe that doubts about Mehsud's death are greatly exaggerated. They point to the fact that the Taliban commander, whose eyes are rimmed with kohl and who wears shoulder-length locks, loves publicity and would pop up in a minute if he were still alive. Last October, Mehsud posed for visiting journalists like a B-movie action hero with a rocket-propelled grenade on his shoulder, and then again leering behind the wheel of a humvee that his men had looted from a NATO convoy trapped in the canyons of the Khyber Pass. (See pictures...
...there has been no sign of Mehsud since his appearance in October, only a continuing flurry of denials by spokesmen of the Pakistani Taliban - a slightly different breed from the Afghan jihadis - that their commander had died. On Tuesday, following the television broadcasts, a Taliban commander told the Pakistani daily The News that Mehsud had become too high profile, and was instructed to hide from the U.S. Predator drones that were raking the skies over the tribal lands in search of al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, thereby escaping another strike. Meanwhile, the Pakistani army admitted to journalists that...
...forces intensified their drone flights over Pakistan's lawless border region after a video was released showing Mehsud posing with a Jordanian doctor, a double agent who on Dec. 30 blew himself up along with seven CIA agents and a Jordanian intelligence officer at a U.S. base near Khost in eastern Afghanistan. Since Jan. 1, say Pakistani military officials, the unmanned drones - the most feared weapon in the U.S. arsenal - have struck 15 times inside Pakistan, usually in remote mountain hamlets that Pakistani ground forces cannot reach. (See pictures of Pakistan's vulnerable frontier with Afghanistan...
...Some Taliban experts say that if Mehsud is indeed dead, his organization won't announce it until a new leader for the Pakistani Taliban is chosen - and that could take a while. "Very likely, there is confusion in the ranks," Talat Masood, a retired general and political analyst, told TIME. "The Taliban will keep on denying Mehsud is dead until the battle for succession is over...