Sep 30 2008
Taliban Leader Baitulla Mehsud Is Dead!
Some great news out of the tribal regions of Pakistan:
The leader of Pakistan’s Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, is dead from kidney failure, sources told CNN.
The Pakistan government blamed Mehsud for the December 27, 2007, assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
An unnamed Islamabad-based source with connections within the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan said Mehsud died about 1 a.m. Wednesday. Military officials in the field confirmed to CNN that Mehsud had died.
Baitullah Mehsud (pictured below) was a very charismatic leader of anti-American Taliban forces in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and thought to be hiding a significant number of al-Qaeda leaders.
 
News of his death probably went out to all key Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders in the area – which possibly resulted in some targets of opportunities for US unmanned drones:
A U.S. pilotless drone fired two missiles at a house in northwest Pakistan killing five people, Pakistani intelligence agency officials said on Wednesday.
Frustrated by an intensifying Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, U.S. forces have in the past month carried out seven missile strikes by pilotless drones and a commando raid on the Pakistani side of the border.
In the latest attack, a drone fired two missiles at a house near the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan, at about midnight on Tuesday (1800 GMT), two intelligence agency officials said.
The area is a known sanctuary for Pakistani Taliban and foreign militants near the Afghan border.
“We have reports of five dead including foreign militants,” said one of the officers, who declined to be identified as he is not authorised to speak to the media.
Allah is probably running low on virgins this month.
I will wait for more confirmation since these guys seem to have obituary of the week things done on them.
The Long War Journal claims that according to sources, he is not dead.
He must go through a lot of conditioner.
“He must go through a lot of conditioner”
Goat pee keeps it pH balanced.
Oh, and there’s this piece of great news:
Come spring when we have run them ragged, our troops rotate home for a rest and a new crop of fresh troops dishes out another serving of hell to the Taliban.
I follow maybe a dozen blogs written by people who work in the intel community and do non classified blogs about the area and most of them are also saying interesting but with little confirmation and possibly a denial and deception operation going on.
The note the only reporting sources are thinly sourced to begin with.
Pakistan has their own reasons to want to find this guy related to the Bhutto murder issues so caution may be best here and in fact really won’t change a lot for us one way or the other until firmer data is available.
Starting to sound a little like Oswald Ruby done Muslimstyle. I’ll bet he would have a lot to say if we were able to help him exercise his freedom of speech.
I think that, if he were dead, there would already be multiple confirmations of this from a number of sources. Mourning mujahideen mostly.
And MerlinOS2, I would love to get the links to the dozen websites you peruse. Not to take away from THIS one at all, just curious is all.