Pakistan arrests senior Taliban aide
Ustad Yasar, a senior aide to Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, is captured in an unusual instance of cross-border cooperation with Afghanistan.
Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan — In an unusual instance of cross-border cooperation, Pakistani authorities arrested a ranking figure in Afghanistan's Taliban movement after receiving a tip he had crossed over into Pakistan, officials disclosed today.
Few details were provided about the arrest of Ustad Yasar, a senior aide to Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. He had been freed by Afghan officials in 2007 in a much-criticized prisoner exchange to secure the freedom of a kidnapped Italian journalist.
Pakistani officials said Yasar was picked up in the frontier city of Peshawar, the hub of the nation's volatile northwest and a growing center of the Islamist insurgency on the Pakistan side of the border. They did not say when the arrest occurred.
Western military officials say senior Taliban commanders as well as lower-level fighters move freely back and forth across the rugged, poorly marked Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. But only rarely do Pakistani officials move to seize such figures on the Pakistan side of the border.
Yasar's arrest was disclosed one day after a meeting in Kabul, the Afghan capital, at which senior Afghan, Pakistani and Western officials discussed ways to better coordinate efforts to fight Islamic insurgents. The capture provided a glimpse of the intertwined command structures of the Taliban movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
According to Pakistani news reports, Mullah Omar sent Yasar, his sometime spokesman, to Pakistan to try to mediate a dispute among Pakistani Taliban factions. Taliban fighters on the Pakistani side of the border have their own leaders and their own agenda of carrying out attacks against Pakistani troops, government installations and other targets. But they are also known to coordinate with Afghan counterparts.
Yasar has been handed off before by Pakistani and Afghan authorities.
He was captured in 2005 in Pakistan, where he had fled into the largely lawless rural border region together with many other Afghan Taliban. Turned over to Kabul authorities, Yasar was jailed in Afghanistan until March 2007, when he was freed in exchange for abducted Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo -- a case that proved a precursor to a string of similar kidnappings.
