Drone Strike Is Said to Kill a Top Pakistani Taliban Figure

By DECLAN WALSH and ISMAIL KHAN 10:10 AM ET

Ishtiaq Mahsud/Associated Press

Wali ur-Rehman, center, the deputy leader of the Pakistani Taliban, in 2011.

A suspected American strike early Wednesday killed Wali ur-Rehman, the deputy leader, two Pakistani officials said, dealing a potentially serious blow to the insurgency.

Ishtiaq Mahsud/Associated Press

Wali ur-Rehman, center, the deputy leader of the Pakistani Taliban, in 2011.

By DECLAN WALSH and ISMAIL KHAN

Published: May 29, 2013

LONDON — A suspected American drone strike killed the deputy leader of the Pakistani Taliban early Wednesday, two Pakistani officials said, dealing a potentially serious blow to an insurgency that has killed thousands of people in Pakistan and encouraged Islamist attacks in the United States.

The deputy leader, Wali ur-Rehman, was among five people killed when missiles fired from a drone struck a house just outside Miram Shah, the main town in the tribal district of North Waziristan, two Pakistani security officials said.

A Taliban commander, speaking in a telephone interview on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that Mr. Rehman, who had a $5 million United States bounty on his head, had been killed.

The official Taliban spokesman, however, said he had no information on the strike. “I am not denying nor confirming it,” the spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said in a telephone interview from an undisclosed location.

The identities of those killed in drone strikes are notoriously difficult to confirm because the remote tribal areas are inaccessible to foreign and most local journalists. But the number of different sources — official and militant — that confirmed the attack on Mr. Rehman suggested he had indeed been killed.

The strike came just days after President Obama announced significant changes to American drone operations abroad, and a week before Nawaz Sharif, whose party won the recent election in Pakistan, is expected to be sworn in as prime minister.

Although the C.I.A.-controlled drone campaign in Pakistan is shrouded in secrecy, analysts said it was unlikely American drones would have struck at such a time unless it had a prominent target in its sights.

Residents reached by phone in Miram Shah said the drone attack occurred around 3 a.m. and hit a house in Chashma Pull village. A local resident said that shortly after the strikes, three pickup trucks carrying fighters rushed to the site to retrieve bodies and look for wounded militants.

A tribal administration official in North Waziristan said that militants had used the targeted compound for meetings and dining. “Half of the compound has been destroyed,” he said, adding that the death toll may increase.

From a mountainous district of South Waziristan, Mr. Rehman was responsible for dozens of suicide attacks on Pakistani civilians and guerrilla assaults on Pakistani army troops. He also organized attacks on NATO troops across the border in Afghanistan, which helped bring him onto America’s list of most-wanted.

In 2010 the United States government listed Mr. Rehman as a “specially designated global terrorist” and offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

Over the past year, Mr. Rehman developed serious differences with the Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, who is also wanted by the United States. Militant sources said the two men disagreed over the future direction of the Taliban insurgency.

Also killed in Wednesday’s strike were two Uzbek militants, officials said.

The C.I.A. has carried out about 360 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, but the rate of attack has dropped sharply this year amid fierce scrutiny of the program in the United States.

Counting Wednesday’s action, there have been 13 drone attacks in 2013, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based group that monitors the strikes.

Drone strikes were a prominent issue in the recent election, and the incoming prime minister, Mr. Sharif, says he plans to engage the United States in “serious” negotiations to put an end to the attacks, which Pakistan says violate its sovereignty.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed “serious concerns” over the drone strike.

“The government of Pakistan has consistently maintained that the drone strikes are counterproductive, entail loss of innocent civilian lives, have human rights and humanitarian implications and violate the principles of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and international law,” the spokesman said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

The drone strike also came the same day that members of the provincial assembly of the northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province were scheduled to take their oaths of office.

That provincial administration will be led by Imran Khan, the former star cricket player turned politician, who led a large anti-drone rally to the edge of the tribal belt last year.

Declan Walsh reported from London, Ismail Khan reported from Peshawar, Pakistan. Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud and Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.

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