al-Qaeda Video Vows To Avenge Baitullah Mehsud’s Death
October 1, 2009 by national
Filed under World Report
Pretty much as expected, al-Qaeda has released a new video vowing to avenge the death of Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in an airstrike in northwest Pakistan on August 6th. The eight-minute video features al-Qaeda’s leader in Afghanistan, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, and bears the logo of the terror network’s media arm As-Sahab.
It was posted to jihadist websites on Thursday.
“Brothers, we inform you that we will avenge the death of Mehsud,” Egyptian-born al-Yazid states in the video.
He appears beside a photo of Mehsud. Cicadas can be heard chirruping in the background, suggesting the video was recorded outdoors.
“I say to the Islamic nation that even if we have lost Baitullah Mehsud there are thousands of tribesmen who are like him and who will take revenge on the Americans and their allies,” al-Yazid added.
Implications of Taliban Leader Baitullah Mehsud’s Death
August 18, 2009 by national
Filed under World Report
U.S. and Pakistani officials say they are heartened by signs of a rift between Pakistani Taliban factions following the apparent death of militant leader Baitullah Mehsud.
Mehsud was the overall head of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Taliban Movement of Pakistan, a loose alliance of 13 factions. He is believed to have been killed in a U.S. missile strike on August 5.
Following are some possible outcomes of Mehsud’s death and the impact on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Western countries that have troops there.
CHAOS IN TALIBAN RANKS
Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told a joint news conference with U.S. special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke on Sunday that there was confusion, disarray and many reports of infighting within the TTP following the report of Mehsud’s death. Holbrooke told reporters traveling with him to Pakistan that Mehsud was “gone” and it looked as if there was a struggle for succession among his commanders.
A splintering of the Taliban would be a major coup for Pakistan, hindering the militants’ ability to conduct coordinated attacks, as the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 fighters under Mehsud’s command are subsumed by various rival commanders.
Mehsud’s fighters are already facing tremendous pressure after security forces cordoned off their strongholds in South Waziristan as part of a government order to the military in June to pursue Mehsud and his group. They are also facing regular strikes by pilot less U.S. drone aircraft, such as the one that apparently killed Mehsud.
Analysts say Mehsud’s death could demoralize his loyalists and could enable the government to exploit divisions by winning over moderate militants to isolate more hard-core elements.
via SCENARIOS: Implications of Pakistani Taliban leader’s death | Reuters.
Baitullah Mehsud – Killed In U.S. Missile Strike
August 6, 2009 by national
Filed under World Report
UPDATE: As is often the case in stories of this nature coming out of the tribal areas, the storyline has again changed. Several sources are now reporting that Baiullah Mehsud is dead. Pakistan believes Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who has a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, was probably killed with his wife and bodyguards in a missile attack, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Friday.
An intelligence officer in South Waziristan told Reuters that Mehsud’s funeral had already taken place, while Pakistani media cited their own security sources saying Mehsud was dead.
“He was killed with his wife and he was buried in Nargosey,” the officer said, referring to a tiny settlement about 1 km (half a mile), from the site of the missile attack, believed carried out by a pilotless U.S. drone aircraft.
Malik said: “We suspect he was killed in the missile strike. We have some information, but we don’t have material evidence.”
UPDATE: Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud was not killed in yesterday’s airstrike in South Waziristan, US intelligence officials told The Long War Journal.
“Baitullah is alive,” one official old The Long War Journal. “We’re aware of the reports that he might have been killed and we are looking into it, but we don’t believe he was killed.”
The late night airstrike on a compound operated by Ikramuddin Mehsud, Baitullah’s father-in-law, in the village of Zanghra in the mountains near Baitullah’s home town of Makeen, killed Baitullah’s second wife and two other Taliban fighters. One of Baitullah’s two brothers was also reported to have been killed.
Witnesses on the scene immediately said that Baitullah was not among those killed. He reportedly visited his wife but left an hour prior to the attack.
Original Post
US and Pakistani officials have said they are checking reports that the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud, has been killed.
He is said to have died in a missile attack on the home of a relative.
A US official said there was “reason to believe reports of his death may be true, but it cannot be confirmed”.
Family members have already confirmed that one of Mehsud’s wives was killed when a US drone attacked her father’s home in South Waziristan on Wednesday.
The area is a stronghold of Mehsud, who has been blamed by Pakistan for a series of suicide bomb attacks in the country.
About 2,000 people have died in such attacks across the country since July 2007, when government forces besieged and captured a radical mosque in Islamabad from Mehsud’s loyalists.
Since then the Taliban in Pakistan have claimed responsibility for some of the worst attacks, but have always denied any role in the murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi in December 2007.
Read previous article – Meet Baitullah Mesud Enemy Number One
Report: Baitullah Mehsud Paid To Attack Pakistan Nuclear Sites
According to a report by Ahmed Quraishi’s at the International Analyst Network, India has paid terrorist leader Baitullah Mehsud nearly $25 million to mount a spectacular attack on a major Pakistani nuclear site. Government officials have not confirmed this report however; there is speculation that it could be at least part of the reason for the stepped up effort to capture Mehsud and quickly end his reign of terror in the region.
The report states that Meshud has created a special force of nearly 500 recruits to mount the operation, a terror mission intended to “shock the world”. The purpose, Quraishi states, is to create an event that will capture global media attention and convince the world of the need for military intervention in Pakistan. Another objective he says, ” is to neutralize voices of reason within the U.S. government that believe Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure”.
While there are no specific details of when the plan was conceived, or whether the 500-strong force, now thought to be operating in smaller cells has been activated, Pakistan remains on a high state of alert, according to the report.
Ahmed Quraishi told the NTARC, “although the Strategic Plans Division (SPD) that oversees Pakistan’s nuclear and strategic programs is taking this threat very seriously, they won’t comment in public. He also added that at least one individual claiming to be a resident of the tribal region has been arrested near Islamabad conducting what appears to be ‘reconnaissance-type activity” in an area designated as a military zone.
National Terror Alert has been unable top confirm this report through additional sources.
Meet Baitullah Mehsud, Enemy Number One
Baitullah Mehsud - Pakistani Taliban Leader
Meet Baitullah Mehsud Pakistan’s biggest problem, and the man who has taken his country of 176 million to the center of the West’s war on terror. Once described by a Pakistani general as a “soldier of peace,” he now carries a 50 million rupee (about $615,300) bounty on his head from Pakistan and a $5 million one from the United States.
Mehsud is earning the ire of the Pakistani military and Western policymakers alike as his movement destabilizes Pakistan, and the United States has destroyed several of his hide-outs with drone strikes in recent months.
His now-famous 2008 press conference — which came almost exactly a decade after Osama bin Laden called for the killing of Americans in a similar announcement just across the border in Khost, Afghanistan — was an extraordinary piece of stagecraft even for a commander with a certain penchant for public flare.
By incautiously exposing his location to a big group of journalists, Mehsud should have facilitated his own capture; that he didn’t serves as ongoing testament to the incompetence (and perhaps lack of will) of those who purport to pursue him.
Mehsud’s growing influence is of particular concern to Western policymakers because Pakistan represents the gravest general security threat to the international community — the prospect of a nuclear-armed al Qaeda. Keeping Pakistan’s nuclear weapons out of the hands of Islamist extremists is contingent on a stable Pakistani state, and Mehsud is the one man perhaps most capable of destabilizing it.
