Taliban Commander

Khalid Fazly arrived on U.S. soil last month carrying his mother's homemade cookies, a prayer rug, dried dates and thousands in $100 bills tucked into his trousers. He was pretty certain he was prepared for America. Except for a car trip to Pakistan, Fazly had never been outside Afghanistan. Now he almost certainly is the only freshman at Indiana's Ball State University who has been threatened with death by the Taliban, survived insurgent ambushes and braved roadside bombs. In Afghanistan, Fazly worked as a translator and "fixer," or problem-solver.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- A U.S. drone strike in northwest Pakistan killed a top Taliban commander responsible for engineering attacks on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Pakistani military and intelligence sources said Thursday. The death of Pakistani Taliban commander Maulvi Nazir deals a significant blow to insurgent ranks that use Pakistan's rugged tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan as sanctuary from which to launch assaults on Western troops battling Afghan Taliban fighters.

A Taliban commander blamed for the deadliest attack on American troops since they entered Afghanistan in late 2001 has been killed in a shootout with security forces in Pakistan, U.S. and Pakistani officials said. Police killed Ahmad Shah, also known as Mullah Ismail, at a roadblock near the northwestern city of Peshawar, a senior Pakistani intelligence official said. Two U.S. security officials confirmed Shah's death in a shootout and said Pakistani authorities had his body. U.S.

The former Taliban commander was furious, chain-smoking, scowling and scattering ashes on a plastic mat spread on the dusty ground. He deeply regretted, he said, that he had defected to the Afghan government side this year with nearly two dozen of his men, one of whom has already been hunted down and killed in revenge. And he did not believe that his former comrades in arms in the insurgency were ready to give up the fight for their traditional heartland. With this year's fighting season drawing to a close as the harsh Afghan winter sets in, U.S. commanders have declared that the "surge" ordered by President Obama two years ago achieved its aims.

U.S. and Afghan forces killed a regional Taliban commander in a clash that also left an American soldier and an Afghan interpreter dead, the U.S. military said. The Taliban commander -- identified by Afghan officials as Thor Mullah Manan -- was killed with another rebel in a firefight with coalition forces Thursday in the Dai Chopan district of the southeastern province of Zabol, the U.S. military statement said.

Pakistani authorities said Monday that they had captured a senior Taliban commander, critically wounding him in a shootout after he crossed into this nation from southern Afghanistan. Mansoor Dadullah, whose more prominent brother Mullah Dadullah was killed by U.S. forces last year in Afghanistan, was captured after he and a small band of fighters encountered a contingent of Pakistani troops in the southwest province of Baluchistan, the Pakistani army said. Army spokesman Maj. Gen.

As bombs rained down and American forces seized a strategic ridgeline from a nest of Al Qaeda and Taliban holdouts in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, details emerged about the veteran Taliban commander U.S. troops may be facing. Rather than being an Arab import, Mullah Saifur Rahman Mansour is a lanky home-grown radical from Paktia province, where the battle is raging, officials and former comrades in the provincial capital of Gardez said.

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Peshawar, Pakistan -- A would-be successor to Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud was reportedly killed today in a gun battle between rival factions of the militant group, in a sign that rifts are surfacing in the wake of his death from a U.S. missile strike. Hakimullah Mahsud, regarded as a leading candidate to replace Baitullah Mahsud, was shot and killed in the exchange of gunfire, said intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Face down before a crowd, the teenage girl shrieks and writhes, begging for mercy. But the three masked men holding her down merely tighten their grip while a fourth man whips her again and again. The video of a 17-year-old girl being publicly flogged by the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley has galvanized the nation, drawing protests from human rights groups, denunciations from the central government and expressions of revulsion from many Pakistanis.

A senior Taliban leader has surrendered to Pakistani authorities and another insurgent commander was killed by a British airstrike in southern Afghanistan, British officials announced. British Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Col. Robin Matthews said in London that Mullah Rahim, the most senior Taliban leader in Helmand province, turned himself in Saturday. Matthews gave no other details, and there was no confirmation from Pakistan. Matthews also said a British missile strike just after midnight Sunday killed Abdul Rasaq, also known as Mullah Rahim, a Taliban commander in Helmand's Musa Qala area.

The Taliban's war was not Osama bin Laden's war. And that, analysts say, is why the killing of the Al Qaeda leader is unlikely to prove a death knell for Afghanistan's resilient homegrown Islamist movement. The methodical tracking of Bin Laden to the Pakistani city of Abbottabad provides an enormous morale boost to the U.S. military and its allies in neighboring Afghanistan. It also points up the strengths of an intelligence-driven strategy of pinpoint raids — methods that also have been successfully employed for much of the last year against the Afghan Taliban's midlevel leadership tier.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai met with regional leaders Saturday to sign an agreement for a massive energy project that could eventually net his country billions of dollars in revenue: a 1,000-mile natural gas pipeline whose proposed route cuts through the heartland of the Taliban insurgency. As if to highlight the complications facing the project, at least 26 people were killed in attacks Friday and Saturday, including a Taliban commander and several people believed to be with a private security firm, Afghan and NATO officials said.

Commander H. is nervous. He rarely sleeps twice in the same place, and tosses away his cellphones almost as often as he changes houses. He can't stay in close contact with the foot soldiers who report to him. And he wonders, sometimes uneasily, whether his leaders are looking to cut a deal with the people who are trying to kill him. Midlevel Taliban field operatives such as Commander H., who leads a cell of fighters outside the southern city...

The father's eyes reddened with tears as he hefted an English textbook that had belonged to his ninth-grade son, Habibuddin. The boy, along with eight other people, was shot dead this month when American special-operations forces swooped down on the family's remote mud-brick compound in the dead of night. "There were no Talibs here — none," Rafiuddin Kushkaki, the owner of the sun-yellowed wheat fields ringing the rural compound, declared in a defiant voice that trailed off into a sob. "Someone tricked the Americans.

With each stroke of the teenage Taliban militant's lash, the girl's muffled cries pierced the air of this Swat Valley town. The men in the crowd watched silently, aching to intervene but frozen by gunmen pacing in front of them with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. A year later, those men say the images from that day remain etched in their memories. The teenage militant wore white. The girl, a 17-year-old named Chand Bibi, stood behind a hastily made screen of sheets and shawls as she was flogged.

NAWA, Afghanistan and KABUL, Afghanistan — Backed by fighter jets and attack helicopters, U.S. Marines and Afghan troops closed in on an insurgent-ridden sector of Marja on Sunday, the ninth day of a coalition bid to wrest control of the southern Afghan town from the Taliban. The fighting, concentrated in Marja's northwest, took place amid what NATO called "determined resistance" from holdout fighters in various locations in and around the town. Advancing coalition troops faced a continuing threat from small-arms fire and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, the Western military said in a statement.

More than 100 relatives and tribal elders watched the Islamic burial of top Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah, who was killed in a U.S.-led operation last month, the militia's new commander said. Dadullah, whose body was handed over to relatives last week by the Afghan government, was buried in the Zod Shar neighborhood of Kandahar city, new Taliban commander Mansoor Dadullah, his brother, said by satellite phone.

The Taliban commander in Kabul was asking a lot of nervous questions. That's how the agent from the opposition knew that he had him in the bag. The agent had been wooing him for more than a year, but it was only after the U.S. threatened to bomb Afghanistan that the commander finally decided to switch sides. In Afghanistan, shifting alliances between regional warlords have always played a key role in battle.

The Afghan Taliban military commander captured last month in Pakistan has refused to provide information that could be used against his insurgent network, prompting the CIA to push for his transfer to a U.S.-run prison in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said Friday. The proposal reflects U.S. frustration with the interrogation of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was taken into custody by Pakistanis working with the CIA nearly a month ago. It also points to the Obama administration's dilemma over what to do with so-called high-value detainees.

The second-in-command of the Afghan Taliban was captured in Pakistan last week during a raid secretly carried out by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence operatives, officials from the two countries said Monday. The arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar deals a serious blow to the Taliban and also represents a potential turning point for the government of Pakistan, which often has seemed reluctant to pursue top members of the militant group that previously ruled Afghanistan and who now take refuge across the border.