Mullah Dadullah's replacement named

Shahabuddin Atal, the Afghan Taliban's spokesman, has confirmed that the group has appointed Dadullah Mansour, brother of Mullah Dadullah, who was killed on Sunday, as the new field commander. Atal told Ahmad Zaidan, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, that the Taliban's spring attacks would not be affected by Dadullah's death.

He said that operations were continuing as planned, led by Mansour. Mansour was freed in March as part of a prisoner swap for the release of Daniele Mastrogiacomo, an Italian journalist kidnapped while working in Afghanistsan. [More]


Comment:

I wonder what the political repercussions of this will be. The Afghan government took a lot of heat for giving in to the Taliban's demands; now one of the people they released has become commander in chief.

Taliban military commander killed

Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban's chief military commander, has been killed in southern Afghanistan according to government officials. James Bays, Al Jazeera's correspondent, was shown a body the authorities said was Dadullah's on Sunday morning.

The body was shown to media in the governor's compound in Kandahar.

A sheet was removed from the body up to the knee to show that part of one of the legs was missing. Dadullah lost a leg fighting Soviet forces in the 1980s.

An Interior Ministry statement said Dadullah was killed in fighting with security forces in Helmand's Girishk district on Saturday night.

Officials from Nato and the US-led coalition could not confirm it and Bays says a Nato source had told him privately that there was still some confusion over the reports but that they did believe the body was Dadullah.

Bays said the Taliban was still confused over whether Dadullah had been killed. Some sources had confirmed the body was his while some others said it was another military commander who also happened to only have one leg. A Taliban spokesman had earlier rejected the government's claim labelling it "propaganda".
Standing next to the body Bays said that although he had never met Dadullah face to face, the corpse was either him or someone bearing a striking resemblance to him.
Television stations interrupted routine broadcasting to give breaking news of the killing.

'Commander of commanders'

Dadullah is the most important rebel commander to be killed since the Taliban was driven from government by a US-led coalition in late 2001, the Afghan intelligence department said. Asadullah Khalid, the Kandahar provincial governor, said Dadullah was killed "in an operation carried out based on very accurate information." Sayed Ansari, the Intelligence agency spokesman, described him as the "biggest Taliban commander ever killed." "He was the commander of commanders," he said. Dadullah was known as the key military strategist in Taliban and was said to be close to Mullah Mohammad Omar, the fugitive Taliban supreme commander. He has bragged to the media about having thousands of men at his command, including hundreds of suicide bombers.

Comment:

Gotcha.

While it's a pity that he wasn't captured alive (see a previous post in the Dungeon), this is an immeasurably great victory for the Coalition. Moreover, it looks as if he was killed by the Afghan military, which speaks well of their growing competency. Hopefully this victory will persuade the Afghan parliament to let us continue on our mission, and hopefully it means we deserve to.

Via Al Jazeera.

U.S. Official: Libyan Behind Afghan Attack During Cheney Visit

KABUL, Afghanistan — A Libyan Al Qaeda commander was likely behind the suicide bombing that killed 23 people outside the main U.S. base in Afghanistan during a February visit by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, a U.S. military official told The Associated Press.

Abu Laith al-Libi, who was featured in an Al Qaeda video last week, is believed to have trained bombers at terror camps, including one busted by U.S. forces in the eastern province of Khost in 2005, said Maj. Chris Belcher, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan.

Cheney was deep inside the sprawling Bagram base at the time of the attack and was not hurt, but the bombing added to the impression that Western forces and the shaky government of President Hamid Karzai are vulnerable to assault by Taliban and Al Qaeda militants.

"Our information suggests that Abu Laith al-Libi was the terrorist who planned the Feb. 27 suicide bomb attack at Bagram Airfield," Belcher said.

"We have information that the planning of this attack was falsely attributed to Usama bin Laden by (Taliban commander) Mullah Dadullah, in order to boost the morale of bin Laden's followers worldwide, in an attempt to reassure those followers that bin Laden is not ill or dead," he said. [More]

Comment:

I thought that seemed a little suspicious. I am slightly skeptical of Maj. Belcher's explanation, though. How is a lie so transparent that even most invertebrates aren't fooled supposed to boost morale? Is Dadullah's opinion of his followers' intelligence really that low? And who in their right mind would hire someone named "Belcher" to be their spokesman?