Pakistani and American officials said Sunday that they were increasingly convinced that the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, Pakistan’s chief domestic enemy and the man behind the suicide attack on a C.I.A. base in Afghanistan in December, had died from wounds sustained in a drone strike. The Pakistani military, which mounted a major offensive against Mr. Mehsud and his loyalists in South Waziristan last fall, said it could not confirm the report. But state-run television set off a storm of speculation on Sunday when it reported that Mr. Mehsud had died. Government officials in the capital, Islamabad, and Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province, said they believed that there was a good chance Mr. Mehsud was dead, though they could not offer proof. An Obama administration official in Washington said intelligence reports over the weekend came close to a definitive conclusion — about 90 percent certainty — that Mr. Mehsud had died from wounds suffered in a drone strike on Jan. 14 and that he was believed to have been buried in a tribal plot in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The United States has been eager to retaliate against Mr. Mehsud after he claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of a C.I.A. base in southeast Afghanistan in late December that killed five agency officers and two private contractors, the deadliest assault against the spy agency in more than 20 years. American officials said they hoped the death of Mr. Mehsud would signal their resolve against the Taliban groups and their Qaeda allies who have used Pakistan’s tribal areas to strike at American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. It would be a serious blow, they said, coming at a time when the group has been battered by an escalation in American drone strikes and the offensive by the Pakistani military that has disrupted their operations. It would not necessarily be a decisive one, however, or one certain to slow the blistering insurgency that the Pakistani Taliban have waged against the Pakistani state with the backing of Al Qaeda. When Baitullah Mehsud, Hakimullah Mehsud’s predecessor, was killed in a drone attack last August, the Pakistani Taliban were briefly roiled by a succession struggle. But the group resumed its suicide bombings, initiating even more sophisticated and numerous attacks that killed more than 500 Pakistanis since October.
The death of Hakimullah Mehsud, if true, would probably set off a new power struggle. But the organizational setback could be short-lived, as the two men in line to take over from him — Wali ur-Rehman, known as the chief military strategist, and Qari Hussain, the chief instructor on suicide bombers — are considered tough operators. Mr. Hussain, who trained with a sectarian group, Lashkar-e-Jangvi, is probably favored by Al Qaeda over Mr. Rehman, experts on the Pakistani Taliban say. Though many government and intelligence officials have said in the past week, and repeated Sunday, that they believed the Taliban leader was probably dead, a cautionary tone weighed on the reports. Senior Pakistani officials, including the interior minister, Rehman Malik, announced that Hakimullah Mehsud, who was about 28, was dead last September. He was reported to have been killed in a succession fight with Mr. Rehman, but later surfaced and went on to claim the leadership of the Pakistani Taliban. After the attack on the C.I.A. base in Afghanistan on Dec. 30, Hakimullah Mehsud appeared in a pre-recorded video alongside the Jordanian double agent who carried out the suicide mission, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi. The men claimed the attack was retribution for the death of Baitullah Mehsud, making Hakimullah Mehsud a prime target of the American drone campaign, which was stepped up through January to include more than a dozen strikes. The competing versions about whether Mr. Hakimullah is alive or not center on the aftermath of a drone attack on Jan. 14, when he was in the village of Shaktoi, a Taliban stronghold, in South Waziristan.
After that drone attack, the Taliban released two tapes of Mr. Hakimullah’s voice to refute assertions that he had been killed. On one of the tapes Mr. Hakimullah could be heard giving the date, Jan. 17, cited as evidence that he had survived. But intelligence agents and local tribesmen said Mr. Hakimullah was badly wounded and was believed to have been taken to Orakzai, an area close to South Waziristan where his wife’s relatives live. According to Azmat Khan, the journalist for the state-owned Pakistan Television Corp. who reported Mr. Hakimullah’s death on Sunday, he died of injuries from the drone attack. Two tribal leaders had told him of the death, and described a funeral that took place in the early hours of Jan. 27 in the village of Tajaka in the Mamozai area of Orakzai. Mr. Khan who is based in Kohat, close to Orakzai, said he did not see the body or attend the funeral. A member of the Pakistani Taliban, a fighter who was close to Mr. Mehsud’s predecessor said in a telephone interview on Sunday night that there were “indications” that Mr. Mehsud had died. The fighter said that Mr. Mehsud had indeed been moved to Orakzai in the past week for medical treatment, and that it was possible that he had died, given the severity of his injuries and the scarcity of medical supplies. Hakimullah Mehsud was specifically chosen by Al Qaeda to succeed Baitullah Mehsud because he was considered most allied to it. His role in facilitating the attack on the American base in Afghanistan showed how much trust Al Qaeda had vested in him, American officials said.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/world/asia/01pstan.html
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