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The Taleban suffered a serious blow yesterday with the death of its most senior, skilled and notorious military commander. One-legged Mullah Dadullah was feared and revered in similar measure as a brutal militant leader who would stop at nothing in terrorising opposition and expelling Western forces from Afghanistan. Yesterday his body, half covered by a pink sheet, was displayed by Afghan authorities, a day after he was killed by US-led coalition and Afghan forces in Helmand province.
Dadullah, infamous for his central role in beheading prisoners as well as coordinating suicide attacks and insurgent operations, is the highest-level Taleban leader killed since 2001. His death comes as the trumpeted Taleban spring offensive has largely failed to materialise and as the militants have come under increasing pressure from Nato operations.
“We are happy he is not alive any more,” Khaleeq Ahmad, spokesman for the Kabul Government, said. “This guy was the main leader in lower Afghanistan and Pakistan.”A Nato statement confirmed that Dadullah “left his sanctuary into southern Afghanistan where he was killed in a US-led coalition operation”.
Nato and Afghan security agencies agreed that Dadullah – whose body appeared to have three bullet wounds to the back of the head and stomach – was killed by forces acting on intelligence. But further details remained contradictory.
The Afghan Interior Ministry claims he was killed at 3am on Saturday, along with his brother and several other militants, near Girishk. Yesterday afternoon, however, the Defence Ministry claimed that he had died near Sangin in an operation spearheaded by the Afghan army and backed by Nato helicopters. Some Afghan officials say he was killed in a car, others that he had been surrounded in a safe house. Though a new commander will inevitably succeed him, it will be hard for the Taleban to find a man with Dadullah’s combination of guerrilla skills, charisma and ruthlessness.
A Pashtun born in the southern province of Uruzgan, Dadullah gained his early combat experience as a mujahidin fighting the Russians. He later rose to prominence as a Taleban commander in the 1990s, and, as one of Mullah Omar’s most trusted lieutenants, was a lead figure in the Taleban’s capture of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. In 1999 he was one of the principal commanders whose men massacred thousands of Hazaras in Bamiyan. Escaping from coalition and Northern Alliance fighters in 2001, Dadullah reappeared in southern Afghanistan the following year as the Taliban’s top operational commander.
Despite the loss of his leg – believed to be the result of a mine blast in the 1980s as he fought the Soviets – recent propaganda videos showed him striding up mountains at the head of columns of insurgents, apparently unhindered by his prosthesis. Last month he boasted to al-Jazeera that Osama bin Laden had helped him to plan the deadly suicide car bombing outside Bagram airbase targeting US Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Weeks earlier he claimed to have thousands of suicide bombers under his command and that he was preparing a huge spring offensive. That never materialised. Instead the insurgents have found themselves on the receiving end of a coordinated chain of Nato and government army operations that has cost them hundreds of casualties, including several key commanders. More importantly, despite a series of killings of civilians by Nato forces this year, the Taleban has so far failed to capture the groundswell support of Pashtuns in the south of Afghanistan. Indeed, much of Nato’s recently acquired intelligence has come from Pashtun villagers in the Taleban heartland of Kandahar and Helmand.
Though Dadullah’s death is a morale boost for the Afghan Government, the country’s stability was threatened by other events yesterday. In the most serious incident of its kind for years, Pakistani and Afghan troops clashed with one another along the border in the east of the country. Pakistan’s military spokesman Major-General Waheed Arshad accused Afghan troops of firing indiscriminately at border posts near the Kurram tribal region, and claimed his men had killed “six or seven” Afghan soldiers in response.
The Afghan Defence Ministry in turn accused the Pakistanis of attempting to move forces across the disputed border and alleged that two children had been killed by Pakistani artillery fire. The two countries have a series of longstanding territorial grievances, but their presidents met only two weeks ago to improve security coordination.
Dadullah was known for making a point of throwing the first stone at women he had sentenced to death by stoning for prostitution. Just before the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif in 2001, Dadullah rounded up farmers and hanged them from lamp-posts as a warning to his opponents He was the only Taleban commander not to hide his face during interviews. During the Muhammad cartoons controversy, he was said to have offered 5kg of gold to anyone who killed a Danish soldier. Dadullah’s recruitment videos show fighters slitting the throats of “infidels” and beheading men accused of spying for the Americans.
The slaughter of thousands of people through his scorched-earth policy in Bamiyan in 1999 so disgusted his commander, Mullah Omar, that he was disarmed. Dadullah’s brutal reputation was such that Taleban radio would instil fear in the opposition by announcing that he was engaged in battles even when he was far from the front line.
