US-led raid kills top Taliban commander

THE Taliban’s most prominent military commander, a one-legged fighter who orchestrated an ethnic massacre and a rash of beheadings, was killed in a US-led military operation in southern Afghanistan, officials said yesterday.

Mullah Dadullah, a top lieutenant of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, was killed Saturday in the southern province of Helmand, said Said Ansari, spokesman for Afghanistan’s intelligence service. NATO confirmed his death, calling it a serious blow to the insurgency.

Dadullah is one of the highest-ranking Taliban leaders killed since the fall of the hard-line regime following the US-led invasion in 2001. His death represents a major victory for the Afghan government and the international coalition struggling to contain a Taliban-led insurgency wracking the south and east.

“Mullah Dadullah was the backbone of the Taliban,” said Asadullah Khalid, governor of the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. “He was a brutal and cruel commander who killed and beheaded Afghan civilians.”

Khalid showed Dadullah’s body to reporters at a news conference in the governor’s compound. The body, lying on a bed and dressed in a traditional Afghan robe, had no left leg and three bullet wounds: one to the back of the head and two to the stomach.

Qari Yousef Ahmadi, a purported Taliban spokesman, denied that the Taliban commander had been killed.

“Mullah Dadullah is alive,” Ahmadi said, without giving further details.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force confirmed the death, saying that, after Dadullah left his “sanctuary” in the south, he was killed in a US-led coalition operation supported by NATO and Afghan troops.

Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Peshawar-based editor for the Pakistani newspaper, The News, and an expert on the Taliban, said Dadullah’s death would be a huge blow for the militant group.

“I think this is the biggest loss for the Taliban in the last six years,” Yusufzai said. “I don’t think they can find someone as daring and as important as Dadullah.”

But Yusufzai and Mustafa Alani, director of security and terrorism studies at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Centre, said the death would have little long-term effect. Alani noted that insurgent attacks in Iraq did not abate after the killing of al-Qaida leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last June.

“In this sort of organisation, people are replaceable, and always there is a second layer, third layer. They will graduate to the leadership,” Alani said. “He is important, no doubt about it. Yes, it is a moral victory, but he’s replaceable.”