Daily News Channel
Pakistan’s Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud is alive, the group’s spokesman told CNN on Tuesday — disputing the Obama administration’s contention that he was killed by a CIA missile strike. Spokesman Maulvi Umar said Mehsud is ill, but safe at an undisclosed location
Already blamed by Pakistan and the CIA for killing Benazir Bhutto, Baitullah Mehsud is just getting started. The articulate, baby-faced commander of the Tehrik-i-Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal wilds along the Afghan border is waging an increasingly coordinated insurgency threatening further destabilization on the eve of parliamentary elections. His forces have embarrassed the Pakistani military in recent weeks by attacking its forts, inflicting heavy losses and seizing weapons before retreating into the mountains of South Waziristan, Mehsud’s home turf
It has been nearly eight years since U.S. forces overthrew the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan, but the war against the Taliban insurgency is bloodier than ever. The number of Afghan civilians killed in the wake of the war has increased 24 percent in the first six months of this year compared with the same time period last year, according to the United Nations.
The U.S. military hopes to kill or capture some 50 Afghan drug traffickers with financial ties to the Taliban in an effort to shut down one of the insurgency’s biggest sources of revenue, a U.S
Baitullah Mehsud is a natural leader: cagey, dogged and charismatic, with an apparent knack for uniting disparate factions around a common cause. But instead of channeling those talents toward building an empire, Mehsud is trying to bring one to its knees. The shadowy Pakistani Taliban commander, whose vertiginous rise to infamy landed him on 2008’s TIME 100 List, has transformed the badlands of South Waziristan into al-Qaeda’s most important redoubt.
American and Pakistani officials say it looked more and more likely that the man was Baitullah Mehsud, who had a $5-million bounty on his head. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, told reporters in Islamabad on Friday Aug. 7 that, “According to my intelligence information, the news is correct
President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser Thursday vowed the U.S. would defeat al Qaeda and declared the president has urged him to be more aggressive in destroying the terrorist organization. John Brennan, Obama’s senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, projected an assertive stance toward the battle against al Qaeda — which Brennan said “remains the most serious threat” the U.S
The downtown Kabul campaign headquarters of Dr. Abdullah Abdullah bustles with the expected frenetic activity of an election engine in the final throes of the campaign season
The boys shuffle into the room in a remote army base high in the mountains of Pakistan’s Swat Valley. They are disheveled, disoriented.
A new Taliban military "code of conduct" calls for restrictions on suicide attacks aimed at avoiding the killing of civilians, but U.S. and Afghan military officials dismissed the document as propaganda, calling it hypocritical. The booklet, obtained by CNN in northwestern Pakistan, has emerged during a crucial moment in the fight between troops and militants in Afghanistan, where battles are raging in the country’s Helmand province and troops work to establish stability for the upcoming presidential elections.