Senior al-Qaida operative 'killed by US missile strike in Pakistan'
Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri, who targeted Europe, believed to be dead after drone attack
Saturday 4 June 2011 17.20 BST
- Article history
A top Pakistani militant linked to attacks in Europe and to al-Qaida's high command was reported killed by a missile fired from a drone on Friday.
The death of Ilyas Kashmiri in the semi-autonomous South Waziristan agency in the border zone of Pakistan had yet to be confirmed, but officials in Kabul said the reports were "credible".
Kashmiri, 46, was falsely reported dead in 2009.
The veteran militant leader, who was behind a plot to attack the offices of a Danish newspaper in 2009 and a series of recent extremist operations in Pakistan, was one of five senior figures named by the US recently as individuals they particularly wanted Pakistani authorities to take action against.
Robert Gates, the US defence secretary is in the region, arriving on Saturday in Kabul for talks with Afghan president Hamid Karzai and senior US commanders. He will then travel around Afghanistan to review the situation on the ground, weeks before an expected presidential announcement of a withdrawal of troops.
The exact number of servicemen and women who will leave Afghanistan has yet to be decided, US officials said.
Gates, who steps down as defence secretary at the end of June, said in remarks en route to Afghanistan that continued military pressure on the Taliban could improve prospects for political reconciliation, something which could accelerate a US "draw-down" of forces.
"You can't be oblivious to the growing war weariness at home and the diminishing support in the Congress," he said. "So I think these are all things that the president will have to weigh and those of us advising him will have to weigh."
Gates said however it was important to achieve the war aims laid down by President Barack Obama, despite the high cost and flagging support.
"I think that once you've committed, that success of the mission should override everything else because the most costly thing of all would be to fail," he said.
All western combat troops are now scheduled to leave Afghanistan by 2014. The current strategy is to build up local security forces to enable a rolling transition of responsibility across the country.
However in recent weeks the level of violence in Afghanistan has risen as insurgents have launched an offensive.
On Friday six Nato soldiers were killed, four of them in a bomb explosion in the east of the country. In all at least 15 western soldiers have died in insurgent violence over the last week. The police chief of northern Afghanistan was assassinated last weekend and there have also been civilians casualties. In the southern city of Kandahar, a bomb hidden in a motorcycle killed two students and wounded another when it detonated on Saturday outside the local university.
The death of Kashmiri, if confirmed, will be a blow to militants in the region. A leader of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami group, he had been reported to be one of the few non-Arabs to be appointed to senior posts within al-Qaida. Whether his position was as formal as some officials claim is not clear, though the fact that he was closely allied with top al-Qaida leaders is undisputed.
One visitor to Kashmiri's base in the Pakistani tribal areas along the frontier with Afghanistan described seeing rooms full of explosive vests for suicide attacks.
However Kashmiri was virtually unknown beyond specialist intelligence circles until two years ago and is thus an example of how new figures continually replace those killed.
The successful strike may help repair relations between Pakistan and the US, which have been strained since the midnight raid by American special forces that killed Osama bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, a northern Pakistani garrison town, just over a month ago.
Kashmiri was considered a threat to both nations.
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