A founding patron of the Taliban in Afghanistan died in the hands of a younger generation of militants in the tribal badlands of Pakistan in the past few days, a victim of the vicious forces he helped create, Pakistani officials said on Monday.
Brigadier Sultan Amir, known by his nom de guerre, Colonel Imam, was captured by the Pakistani Taliban in northern Waziristan in March last year.
Whether he was killed by his captors, or died of a heart attack as reported by the Taliban, remained unclear.
The demise of Imam comes 10 days after another veteran figure in the emergence of the Afghan Taliban, General Naseerullah Babar, 82, died after a long illness at his home in Peshawar in northwest Pakistan.
The death of the two men signified the end of an era of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan that began in the 1970s, stretched into the US-backed mujahidin resistance against the Soviet occupation and was followed by the coercive Taliban rule of Afghanistan in the 1990s.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US, a Pakistani Taliban formed, inspired by the Afghan Taliban, to fight the Pakistani state.
When the Taliban dominated Afghanistan in the 1990s, Babar, then the interior minister under then-Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, called the new rulers “our boys.”
Imam, working for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), served as Pakistan’s consul general in the strategic Afghan town of Herat, providing vital financial and military support to the Taliban.
Imam formed a close bond with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader who welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan.
STAYING RELEVANT
After Sept. 11, when the Taliban movement became stronger in Pakistan, Imam struggled to stay relevant to a new younger generation of jihadists, more ruthless and uncontrollable.
In March, he escorted a British journalist of Pakistani origin, Asad Qureshi, to North Waziristan. Another former ISI official, Khalid Khawaja, was in the group. The three men were kidnapped by militants calling themselves “Asian Tigers,” a wild bunch of Mehsud tribesmen and Punjabi militants who fought among themselves.
The Tigers killed Khawaja in April, branding him an agent of the CIA and the ISI. The British journalist was released in September.
Imam’s family appealed for his release through the Haqqani network, the most powerful militants in North Waziristan and allies of the Pakistani military. However, the Haqqanis were unable to secure his release, and it appeared that the Pakistani army and security services were either unable or unwilling to organize a rescue operation.
“This was a big error on his part believing he would be welcome now in North Waziristan,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist who covered Imam for many years.
By the time Imam got to North Waziristan last year, the old guard of the Taliban that he had known had been killed or arrested, Yusufzai said.
The new guard lacked an ideology and North Waziristan had been transformed into a uncontrollable brew of groups fighting the Pakistani state, as well as Afghan Taliban fighting the Americans in Afghanistan.
A weathered figure with a long white beard and white turban who looked to be in his 70s, Imam was initially trained by the Special Forces at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1974, and completed a master parachutist course with the 82nd Airborne Division.
In the late 1970s, he taught young Afghans who fled the Communist revolution in 1978, including the future resistance leaders Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmed Shah Masood. During the US covert war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Imam worked closely with the CIA, running training camps for mujahidin guerrillas in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
RANSOM
A senior Pakistani government official in the tribal areas, Tariq Hayat, said on Monday that he had been informed by a Pakistani official in North Waziristan that Imam was dead. The militants were demanding a ransom for the return of the body, he said.
Only after the body has been reclaimed would the cause of death be known, Hayat said.
Of the two men, Babar was the more senior, the more influential. He was a powerful minister of interior in the 1990s for Bhutto and conducted a brutal crackdown on political and criminal gangs in Karachi in 1996. He viewed the creation of the Taliban in Afghanistan as an important buffer for Pakistan against central Asia and Russia.
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