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May 13 2007
The Taliban’s most prominent military commander was killed in fighting in southern Afghanistan with Afghan and Western troops, officials said today.
Mullah Dadullah, a top lieutenant of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, was killed yesterday in the southern province of Helmand, said Said Ansari, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s intelligence service.
Dadullah is one of the highest-ranking Taliban leaders to be killed since the fall of the hard-line regime following the US-led invasion in 2001. His death would represent a major victory for the Afghan government and the international coalition that has struggled to contain a Taliban-led insurgency wracking the south and east of the country.
Kandahar Governor Asadullah Khalid said Dadullah, who had only one leg, died during an operation by US-led coalition, Nato and Afghan troops.
“Mullah Dadullah was the backbone of the Taliban,” said Khalid.
“He was a brutal and cruel commander who killed and beheaded Afghan civilians.”
Khalid showed Dadullah’s body to reporters at a news conference in the governor’s compound. The body, which was lying on a bed and dressed in a traditional Afghan robe, had no left leg and three bullet wounds: one to the back of the head and two to the stomach.
A second intelligence service official said Dadullah was killed near the Sangin and Nahri Sarraj districts of Helmand province, an area that has seen heavy fighting during the last several weeks involving British and Afghan troops and US Special Forces.
In December, a US airstrike near the Pakistan border killed another top Taliban commander in southern Afghanistan, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani. Dadullah, Osmani and policy-maker Mullah Obaidullah had been considered to be Omar’s top three leaders.
Dadullah, who comes from the southern province of Uruzgan, lost a leg fighting against the Soviet army that occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s. He emerged as a Taliban commander during its fight against the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan during the 1990s, helping the hard-line militia to capture the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
Dadullah – an ethnic Pashtun, the group that makes up the core of the Taliban and is prominent in eastern and southern Afghanistan – led a Taliban massacre of ethnic Hazaras in 1999 in the province of Bamiyan, where the Taliban in 2000 destroyed two large, ancient Buddha statues carved into a hillside cliff.
Since the Taliban’s ouster in late 2001, Dadullah emerged as probably the militant group’s most prominent and feared commander. He often appeared in videos and media interviews, and earlier this year predicted a massive militant spring offensive that has failed to materialise.
