Senior Taliban 'held in Pakistan'

Afghan intelligence sources have told Al Jazeera that four senior members of the Taliban movement have been captured in Pakistan. The men were arrested in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province near to the border with Afghanistan, the sources said on Sunday.

The men are believed to include two senior aides to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, his chief of staff and the group's head of communications. Pakistan's security services have refused to confirm the reports.

Mullah Omar has not been seen since 2001 when he fled after US-led forces pushed the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan. In January, Afghan authorities released a videotape of a captured alleged Taliban spokesman in which he said that Mullah Omar was living in Quetta under the protection of the Pakistani security services. Islamabad has denied hiding the Taliban leader and repeatedly says it is working to stop the group from operating in southwestern Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees live in the province making it easy for Taliban members to hide among them.

Via Al Jazeera.


Comment:

The Chief of Staff and the head of communications, excellent. I can't speculate about the "senior aides" without more information, but the capture of these two people will cause serious headaches for the Taliban—and possibly al-Qaeda. One of the Dadullahs, I forget which one, said that Osama bin Laden regularly sends communiqués to the Taliban. There is reason to be skeptical of this claim, but if it is true, Mullah Omar's head of communications may well know who the courier(s) is (are). That person, in turn, would likely know where bin Laden is, or at least might know somebody else who knows where he is. Even if the Dadullah was lying, though, the loss of his Chief of Staff and head of communications will throw the Taliban's executive office into turmoil for a while, possibly even temporarily severing it from the rest of the organization. Regrettably, it is Dadullah Mansour, not Mullah Omar, who is the Taliban's Commander in Chief, so the army is unlikely to be overly affected, but still, every bit of chaos in the enemy's camp is a good thing.