NEW YORK TIMES
KABUL, Afghanistan — Baitullah Mehsud is perhaps the most prominent example of a tribal Taliban fighter who at first fought in Afghanistan and cooperated with the Pakistani Army, but then turned against his own country, unleashing a vicious campaign of violence in the name of spreading the rule of Islam.
The most wanted terrorist in Pakistan by the time of his apparent death on Wednesday in his mid-30s, he rocketed to notoriety in just three years as the leader of the Pakistani Taliban and became a key figure in Al Qaeda’s regional operations.
His turn against the Pakistan state, intelligence analysts say, was seen as a direct result of his close alliance with Al Qaeda, in particular with Ayman al-Zawahri, the second in command, as well as the powerful Afghan Taliban leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who also has a close working connection to Al Qaeda.
Mr. Mehsud, whose death in a missile strike was yet to be officially confirmed, was accused of being behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister, in a suicide bombing in December 2007, among scores of other attacks. These include last year’s bombing of the Marriott Hotel in the capital, Islamabad.
But it was the attack on Ms. Bhutto that served as a wake-up call for Pakistan’s security services and political circles, which had for years supported those fighting in Afghanistan as Muslim heroes.
After Ms. Bhutto’s death, when Pakistan’s Interior Ministry released a telephone intercept implicating Mr. Mehsud in her assassination, the liberal newspaper Daily Times wrote, “Al Qaeda is now as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it is an Arab or foreign element.”
Mr. Mehsud was once a minor figure in the small Shabi Khel branch of the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan, an inhospitable mountainous territory that fiercely resisted efforts by the armies of the British empire to conquer it. The son of a prayer leader, he had a basic religious education where he grew up in Miram Shah, the capital of North Waziristan. It was probably there that he was first recruited to fight in Afghanistan alongside the Taliban during their period in government in the late 1990s.
He served with the Taliban at the Kabul airport, according to a senior Afghan security official. After the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, he returned to his native Waziristan, accompanied by thousands of Afghan Taliban and hundreds of foreign Qaeda fighters who settled in North and South Waziristan.
As the Pakistani Army began operations in Waziristan in 2004, Mr. Mehsud was promoted by the Taliban leadership to command the fighters from the Mehsud tribe.
But Pakistani officials still considered him someone they could deal with, and in February 2005 they signed a much-criticized peace deal under which the army pulled back its forces, giving Mr. Mehsud freedom to operate in South Waziristan.
He quickly expanded his forces and power, and by December 2007 he had been named the leader of the Tehrik-e-Taliban, the umbrella movement that commands most of the Taliban groups throughout Pakistan’s tribal areas and the adjoining Swat Valley.
His growth had brought Mr. Mehsud back into confrontation with the Pakistani military. In 2007, he took about 250 Pakistani Army soldiers hostage when they tried to pass through his tribal territory.
The hostage-taking came just days after the government laid siege to militants in the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007, and was apparently in retaliation for the government’s crackdown.
Mr. Mehsud began attacking Pakistani military and intelligence targets in the tribal areas and beyond, and was behind almost all of the scores of suicide bombings that have occurred in Pakistan’s cities since then, according to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the commander of the Pakistani Army.
Afghan security officials said that Mr. Mehsud had also sent suicide bombers to Afghanistan and to Iraq since 2006, as the number of suicide bombings soared in those countries.
He hosted many foreign fighters in his territory, including Uzbeks and others from Central Asia, and he ran training camps to indoctrinate suicide bombers, weapons he once called his own atom bombs. Working closely with him in training suicide bombers were two Pakistani militants, named Qari Zafar and Qari Hussain.
Mr. Mehsud also ran private jails and held dozens of kidnapped hostages, trading them for money or for his own fighters caught by the Pakistani authorities. Among those who fell into his hands was the Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan, Tariq Azizuddin, who was held for three months and met Mr. Mehsud twice, according to Pakistani officials.
Mr. Mehsud already then complained that he had to be constantly on the move, to avoid the surveillance of C.I.A.-operated drones, which were striking targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the officials said. By this year he was moving every 30 minutes to avoid detection, according to a Taliban fighter.
Yet he survived two large-scale operations against his fighters by the Pakistani military, one in January 2008 and another in June 2009.
Both times the Pakistani military seemed to pull back before finishing off Mr. Mehsud and his forces, prompting suspicions that he was still regarded as an asset by the military establishment, which has long supported militant groups to fight proxy wars in Kashmir and Afghanistan.
But his attacks inside Pakistan escalated with complex attacks on government buildings and five-star hotels, which were seen as a threat to the nation.
Last March, the United States put a $5 million reward on his head. In June, Pakistan declared him its “enemy No. 1.”
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