HE PROBABLY didn’t see it coming. Last Tuesday night, Baitullah Mehsud was hooked up to a drip in a remote farmhouse in Pakistan’s tribal badlands, his second wife by his side, being treated for a long-standing kidney ailment.
Then a pair of Hellfire missiles slammed through the roof, fired from a CIA-operated drone hovering in the inky sky. The Taliban commander, his wife, brother and several bodyguards perished, Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior minister, said yesterday.
Death by drone may be silent, but news of Mehsud’s demise was loudly hailed as a signal victory for Pakistan in its struggle against violent extremism. A border warrior turned high priest of suicide bombers, Mehsud was more notorious in Pakistan than Osama bin Laden, and as feared as the Iraqi insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed two years ago.
“It is quite a setback for the Taliban movement,” said Brig Mehmood Shah, a former chief of security for the tribal areas.
Mehsud’s death also marked a stunning strike for America’s hi-tech, low-risk war in Pakistan’s tribal belt. Lifting off from a base in western Pakistan, the drones are guided by pilots sitting in a US Air Force HQ in the Nevada desert, thousands of miles away.
But while it may resemble a computer game to the pilots, the latest attack had a tremulous impact far beyond the strike site.
As reports of Mehsud’s killing filtered out, a gunfight between Mehsud loyalists and a rival faction erupted in the nearby town of Tank, leaving at least 14 people dead. In the capital, Islamabad, police chiefs boosted security, fearing a retaliatory strike from the legion of suicide bombers that made Mehsud’s reputation.
And somewhere in deepest Waziristan, a meeting of Mehsud’s top deputies got under way to decide who will succeed him as the head of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Pakistan’s most powerful militant outfit.
Speculation that Mehsud was dead started building on Thursday night when White House officials briefed reporters of “strong indications” that the Taliban leader had been killed. By lunchtime yesterday qualified official confirmations began to emerge. “He has been taken out,” said foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, cautioning that “100 per cent confirmation” was not possible until a forensics team reached the site.
But a senior Mehsud aide, Kafayat Ullah, confirmed that Mehsud and his wife had died, offering no further details.
Pakistani television channels, quoting intelligence sources, said he had already been buried in Narkosai, a small village near the strike site. In Washington, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs refused to confirm the killing, but noted a “growing consensus among credible observers that he is indeed dead”. – (Guardian service)
