DUBAI: Fazal Hayat, more commonly known as Mullah Fazlullah, the fugitive leader of the outlawed militant group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), was killed on June 13 by an American drone strike. Arab News can reveal he was returning from an iftar party in the Marawara district of Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar province.
According to an intelligence report seen by Arab News, Fazlullah was leaving the former militant center of the TTP at Bachai Markaz, in district Marwara, Kunar Province. He had Iftar and offered “Tiraveh” at the same center on June 13, 2018.
Fazlullah reportedly left the center around 10:45 p.m., but as soon as he entered his vehicle, a rocket fired from a US drone struck the car, killing Fazlullah and his guards.
Another TTP commander, Qari Yasir, was also among the dead, according to the report. The five men who died in the drone attack were buried in Bachai Graveyard early in the morning of June 14.
Fazlullah was reportedly a key topic of conversation during the official visit of Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa and Naveed Mukhtar, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, to Afghanistan on June 12, when he discussed the political and military situation in the region with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Gen. John Nicholson, the commander of NATO’s Resolute Support mission.
“This news today of a US drone targeting the TTP chief is an indication of some kind of ‘thaw’ between Pakistan and the USA,” an official who was part of the Pakistani delegation told Arab News, on condition of anonymity.
Bajwa’s visit came days after the Afghan Taliban announcement on June 9 of a three-day cease-fire over Eid Al-Fitr, the first truce of its kind offered by the Taliban since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Fazlullah, who escaped a major counter-terror operation carried out by the Pakistani military in the northwestern Swat Valley in 2009, had since regrouped his fighters in the border region of Afghanistan, according to security officials.
He is believed to have been responsible for a number of atrocities, including the 2014 attack on an army-run school in Peshawar that resulted in the deaths of almost 150 students and teachers, and ordering an assassination attempt on Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai in Swat in 2012.
Fazlullah was appointed TTP chief after a US drone strike killed his predecessor Hakimullah Mehsud in the North Waziristan region in November 2013.
Fazlullah’s 17-year-old son Abdullah and 20 other militants were reportedly killed in another US drone strike in Kunar in March this year.
Fazlullah’s deputy, Noor Wali Mehsud, will most likely be his successor, according to a TTP source.
Mehsud, 40, was the TTP’s Karachi chief from June 2013 until May 2015 and is the author of the book “Inqilab-e-Mehsud,” in which he claimed to have assassinated former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
— Naimat Khan in Karachi and Tahir Khan in Islamabad contributed to this story.
How an iftar party led to the killing of Pakistani Taliban chief
How an iftar party led to the killing of Pakistani Taliban chief
- Mullah Fazlullah was killed on June 13 by an American drone strike
- As soon as he entered his vehicle, a rocket fired from a US drone struck the car
Related
Afghanistan says it thwarted Pakistani airstrike on Bagram Air Base as fighting enters fourth day
- The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years
- Pakistan accuses Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it
KABUL: Afghanistan thwarted attempted airstrikes on Bagram Air Base, the former US military base north of Kabul, authorities said Sunday, while cross-border fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan stretched into a fourth day.
The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years, with Pakistan declaring that it’s in “open war” with Afghanistan.
The conflict has alarmed the international community, particularly as the area is one where other militant organizations, including Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group, still have a presence and have been trying to resurface.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it and also of allying with its archrival India.
Border clashes in October killed dozens of soldiers, civilians and suspected militants until a Qatari-mediated ceasefire ended the intense fighting. But several rounds of peace talks in Turkiye in November failed to produce a lasting agreement, and the two sides have occasionally traded fire since then.
On Sunday, the police headquarters of Parwan province, where Bagram is located, said in a statement that several Pakistani military jets had entered Afghan airspace “and attempted to bomb Bagram Air Base” at around 5 a.m.
The statement said Afghan forces responded with “anti-aircraft and missile defense systems” and had managed to thwart the attack.
There was no immediate response from Pakistan’s military or government regarding Kabul’s claim of attempted airstrikes on Bagram or the ongoing fighting.
Bagram was the United States’ largest military base in Afghanistan. It was taken over by the Taliban as they swept across the country and took control in the wake of the chaotic US withdrawal from the country in 2021. Last year, US President Donald Trump suggested he wanted to reestablish a US presence at the base.
The current fighting began when Afghanistan launched a broad cross-border attack on Thursday night, saying it was in retaliation for Pakistani airstrikes the previous Sunday.
Pakistan had said its airstrike had targeted the outlawed Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. Afghanistan had said only civilians were killed.
The TTP militant group, which is separate but closely allied with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, operates inside Pakistan, where it has been blamed for hundreds of deaths in bombings and other attacks over the years.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of providing a safe haven within Afghanistan for the TTP, an accusation that Afghanistan denies.
After Thursday’s Afghan attack, Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif declared that “our patience has now run out. Now it is open war between us.”
In the ongoing fighting, each side claims to have killed hundreds of the other side’s forces — and both governments put their own casualties at drastically lower numbers.
Two Pakistani security officials said that Pakistani ground forces were still in control on Sunday of a key Afghan post and a 32-square-kilometer area in the southern Zhob sector near Kandahar province, after having seized it during fighting Friday. The captured post and surrounding area remain under Pakistani control, they added. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
In Kabul, the Afghan government rejected Pakistan’s claims. Deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat called the reports “baseless.”
Afghan officials said that fighting had continued overnight and into Sunday in the border areas.
The police command spokesman for Nangarhar province, Said Tayyeb Hammad, said that anti-aircraft missiles were used from the provincial capital, Jalalabad, and surrounding areas on Pakistani fighter jets flying overhead Sunday morning.
Defense Ministry spokesman Enayatulah Khowarazmi said that Afghan forces had launched counterattacks with snipers across the border from Nangarhar, Paktia, Khost and Kandahar provinces overnight. He said that two Pakistani drones had been shot down and dozens of Pakistani soldiers had been killed.
Fitrat said that Pakistani drone attacks hit civilian homes in Nangarhar province late Saturday, killing a woman and a child, while mortar fire killed another civilian when it hit a home in Paktia province.
There was no immediate response to the claims from Pakistani officials.
