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Top Pakistani al Qaeda Leader Reportedly Killed
June 4, 2011 | 1806 GMT
SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty ImagesTop Pakistani al Qaeda militant Ilyas
Kashmiri on July 11, 2001
Ilyas Kashmiri, the top Pakistani al Qaeda leader, was
reportedly killed in a June 3 U.S.
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) strike in Pakistans northwestern
tribal region, according toPakistani intelligence and Kashmiris
group. Kashmiri was the leader of Hizb-ul-Jihad al-
Islami, the 313 Brigade, and al Qaedas elite unit Lashkar
al-Zil. According to preliminaryreports, he was among eight
militants killed when three missiles targeted a facility around
midnight in Shawangai village, seven kilometers north of Wana,
the headquarters of South
Waziristan agency.
Kashmiri has been reported killed before and there is no way to
confirm that he is nowactually dead. However, if he was killed and
Pakistan provided the intelligence that allowed
the United States to conduct the airstrike, it could be a sign
of greater cooperation. Thiswould be particularly significant
following the raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin
Laden as he was hiding deep within Pakistani territory (with
some suspected Pakistaniprotection) and brought relations between
Islamabad and Washington to a low ebb.
The senior al Qaeda leader was at one point a Pakistani commando
who was active in the
Islamist insurgency against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the
1980s. Originally from
Pakistani-administered Kashmir, Kashmiri was a key Islamist
militant figure fighting inIndian-administered Kashmir in the 1990s
but then turned against the Pakistani state andjoined al Qaeda
after Islamabad cracked down on anti-India militant groups
following an
attack on the Indian parliament in 2002 that nearly brought the
two South Asian countriesto war.
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Kashmiri was believed to be involved in scores of attacks
against Pakistani army andintelligence since the Red Mosque siege
in mid-2007, including the assault on the Pakistani
headquarters in late 2009 and more recently the attack on the
naval air base in Karachi. But
Kashmiri is most notoriously known for his involvement in the
2008 Mumbai attacks andfor dispatching David Headley, the
Pakistani-American al-Qaeda operative on trial in theUnited States,
for planning attacks in Europe.
Kashmiris purported death comes a few days after the killing of
a Pakistani journalist,
Syed Saleem Shahzad, allegedly due to torture at the hands of
Pakistans Inter-ServicesIntelligence (ISI) directorate operatives.
Shahzad was renowned for his reports on jihadists
and was the only journalist that had ever interviewed Kashmiri,
(in South Waziristan in2009, after the jihadist leader was reported
to have been killed in a UAV strike). The killing
also comes within a few days of reports that joint CIA-ISI teams
had been established tohunt down five top Taliban and al Qaeda
leaders, including Kashmiri.
If Kashmiri is indeed dead, he could have been tracked through a
variety of sources.According to a Reuters report, the ISI had been
closing in on Kashmiri, who was tracked to
the targeted facility located in the areas under the control of
a local Taliban commanderMaulvi Nazir who is allied with the
Pakistani state. The ISI may have provided the CIA
with his coordinates. The CIA, which runs UAV operations over
Pakistani territory, couldhave also developed information from its
own sources in Pakistan, cross-border operations
from Afghanistan, or even its advanced signals and imagery
intelligence capabilities. Thelatter have generally been defeated
by the operational security of al Qaeda and its
associates, so liaison with Pakistan or human intelligence
likely played a role if Kashmiriwas indeed identified.
It remains unclear how Kashmiri was found and the extent (if
any) of U.S.-Pakistani
cooperation on the attack that killed him. As an individual who
targeted the Pakistani stateas well as the West, both would have an
interest in seeing him eliminated. If collaboration
between the United States and Pakistani intelligence led to his
death, it could help improvethe strained ties between the two
countries, as well as between Pakistan and India, which,
given his activities against Indian interests, also sought to
see Kashmiri taken out.
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