Pakistan Taliban Chief in US sights

PAKISTAN: Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of Pakistan’s Taliban who has a five million dollar bounty on his head has a penchant for theatrics and surfaced in a video this year to dramatically deny reports of his death.

The United States charged “the self-proclaimed emir of the Pakistani Taliban” with terrorism Wednesday over the murder of seven Americans at a CIA base in Afghanistan in December, the deadliest attack on the agency since 1983.

Washington also offered a reward of up to five million dollars for information on his whereabouts and added his Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to a blacklist of foreign terrorist groups.

Under his leadership, the Al-Qaeda linked TTP has waged some of the most audacious attacks of a three-year Islamist bombing campaign, cementing its reputation as Pakistan’s biggest national security threat.

More than 3,600 people have been killed in the violence unleashed against soldiers, government officials and civilians since government troops besieged a radical mosque in Islamabad in July 2007.

Young, energetic and with a penchant for the limelight, Hakimullah took the helm of the TTP after winning a bitter leadership struggle when a US drone attack killed the faction’s founder, Baitullah Mehsud, in August last year.

He swore revenge and within weeks the network claimed a 20-hour siege on Pakistan’s army headquarters, a humiliating assault on the most powerful institution in the country.

After months of silence following his reported killing by a US missile on January 14 in North Waziristan near the Afghan border, Hakimullah resurfaced to threaten revenge attacks on major US cities in videos issued in May.

The US strike followed Mehsud’s appearance in a video sitting next to the Jordanian Al-Qaeda double agent who claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on CIA agents at a US base in Khost, across the border in Afghanistan.

Peshawar, Thursday, AFP