Baitullah Mahsud

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Peshawar, Pakistan -- Faced with the prospect of rifts among its ranks after a U.S. drone strike killed leader Baitullah Mahsud, the Pakistani Taliban announced today that it had chosen one of his deputies to succeed him. A 28-year-old commander named Hakimullah Mahsud will lead Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, a militant organization based in the tribal areas along the Afghan border and blamed for many of...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - A top U.N. investigator has criticized Washington's drone missile campaign against Islamic militants in Pakistan as a violation of the South Asian nation's sovereignty, a stance that echoes Islamabad's public condemnations of the tactic but not one that is expected to end U.S. airstrikes. Ben Emmerson, U.N. special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, issued a statement Friday saying the U.S. drone campaign “involves the use of force on the territory of another state without its consent, and is therefore a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty.” “Pakistan has also been quite clear that it considers the drone campaign to be counter-productive and to be radicalizing a whole new generation,” Emmerson added, “thereby perpetuating the problem of terrorism in the region.” Emmerson's remarks came after he made a three-day visit to Pakistan last week, meeting with top Pakistani officials as well as tribal elders and victims of drone strikes.

The chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mahsud, and close associates attended the funeral of a militant commander in the country's tribal areas but left before a suspected U.S. drone attack that killed dozens of people, residents said Wednesday. The area where the attack occurred, the Bekh Mary Langara region of South Waziristan, is remote and there was no independent confirmation of the number of casualties.

The Justice Department has charged Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mahsud with two counts of conspiracy for his alleged role in planning a December 2009 suicide attack in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA employees. Mahsud is the leader of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, a group the U.S. affidavit also alleges was behind the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007 and numerous attacks on NATO supply lines into Afghanistan.

The American missile strike that killed Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mahsud, Pakistan's most wanted terrorist and a staunch Al Qaeda ally, dealt a devastating broadside to militants and handed the U.S. a major victory in its bid to help stabilize the volatile nuclear state. Mahsud's death, confirmed by top Pakistani officials as well as the Taliban, creates a vacuum within the command structure of the militant group and gives the Pakistani military a unique opportunity to weaken the group, former top Pakistani security and intelligence officials said.

Baitullah Mahsud, the leader of Pakistan's Taliban movement, threatened Tuesday to launch attacks in the United States in retaliation for missile strikes by American drones aimed at militant leaders sheltering in Pakistan's tribal areas. In an unusual step, the normally reclusive Mahsud personally made a round of telephone calls to news media representatives claiming responsibility for an audacious commando-style strike on a police training school near the eastern city of Lahore a day earlier.

Missile attacks believed to be carried out by U.S. drone aircraft Friday targeted a training center and a communications base run by one of Pakistan's most wanted militant leaders, killing 17 people and injuring 27. The attacks in South Waziristan, where Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud and his fighters are entrenched in tribal areas along the Afghan border, come just more than a week after Mahsud narrowly escaped a drone attack on a funeral attended by Taliban militants.

For years, Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban have nurtured a symbiotic relationship that has paid off for both militant groups. The Taliban provided Al Qaeda and its leaders sanctuary within the rugged wasteland of Pakistan's tribal areas along the Afghan border. In turn, Al Qaeda trained and helped finance its host. Now, with the purported death of Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud and his organization temporarily rudderless, Al Qaeda finds itself made vulnerable by the disarray plaguing its patron, experts and Pakistani intelligence sources say. It's a window of opportunity that neither Pakistan nor the United States can afford to neglect.

The Taliban's top spokesman in Pakistan, captured this week by tribal fighters and security forces, has confirmed that the country's most wanted militant was killed recently by a U.S. missile strike, sources familiar with his interrogation said today. Maulvi Umar was arrested in the remote Mohmand region along the Afghan border late Monday night with the help of a tribal militia, according to military sources who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the matter.

A U.S. missile slammed into a suspected Taliban camp in a lawless Pakistani tribal region, intelligence officials and Taliban commanders said, killing as many as 14 people, nearly a week after a similar strike reportedly took out the group's leader. The missile hit a compound in Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud's stronghold, South Waziristan, near the Afghan border, intelligence officials said.

Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mahsud warned in video released Monday that his insurgent group has deployed suicide bombers in the U.S. and that they would soon carry out attacks in major American cities. The video, which showed Mahsud flanked by two militants wearing white veils, came as U.S. law enforcement officials said there was no evidence to support a Pakistani Taliban claim of responsibility for a car bomb found in downtown New York during the weekend. Skeptical analysts said they believed the militant group lacks the capability or reach to carry out such missions in the U.S. "Our [suicide bombers]

Security sources confirmed Thursday that Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mahsud is alive, reversing their assertions earlier this year that he had been killed in a U.S. drone missile strike. The disclosure that Mahsud, 28, survived a January strike near the border between North and South Waziristan deals a major blow to U.S. and Pakistani efforts to uproot Islamic militants from their stronghold in the largely ungoverned tribal areas along the Afghan border. "He's alive.

The Pakistani Taliban confirmed Tuesday that its leader, Hakimullah Mahsud, has died from injuries suffered in a U.S. drone missile strike last month, forcing the insurgency to find a new leader for the second time in six months. The death of Mahsud, engineer of a devastating series of suicide attacks and raids on markets, mosques and security installations across Pakistan late last year, gives the United States another major victory in its campaign of missile strikes against top Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders.

The Pakistani army Sunday was investigating reports that Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mahsud may have been killed in a drone strike last month. If confirmed, the militant's death could deal insurgents a severe setback in their battle against the government. Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said Mahsud, 28, was wounded Jan. 17 in a U.S. airstrike that targeted two cars in North Waziristan, a largely Taliban-controlled tribal region along the border with Afghanistan. Abbas said intelligence agents are investigating a report on state television that Mahsud was killed in the airstrike and buried four days ago in the tribal district of Orakzai.

A Pakistani television station aired a video Saturday allegedly showing the suicide bomber who hit a CIA outpost in Afghanistan telling the Pakistani Taliban leader that he had shared U.S. and Jordanian intelligence secrets with fellow militants. He also urged militants to strike other U.S. targets in retaliation for the killing of the leader's predecessor last year in a U.S. missile strike. Although its veracity could not be immediately determined, the video is a powerful recruiting tool and its content potentially embarrassing to the U.S. spy agency.

One by one, recruits from Pakistan's Punjab heartland would make the seven-hour drive to Waziristan, where they would pull up to an office that made no secret of its mission. The signboard above the office door read "Tehrik-e-Taliban." In a largely ungoverned city like Miram Shah, there was no reason to hide its identity. The trainees from Sargodha would arrive, grab some sleep at the Taliban office and afterward head into Waziristan's rugged mountains for instruction in skills including karate and handling explosives and automatic rifles.

On the second day of Pakistan's major offensive to uproot the Taliban from the country's tribal areas along the Afghan border, the military claimed to have killed 60 militants, while the Taliban countered that it had fended off the troops' initial surge. Wildly differing interpretations of progress being made on both sides are expected to continue in coming weeks, as the military pushes forward with its most crucial ground operation so far in its war against Islamist militants.