ISLAMABAD, March 2: Pakistan’s reported capture of the former Taliban defence minister boosts its anti-terror credentials and delivers a setback to the insurgent movement, but is unlikely to curb another wave of militant violence this year, analysts said on Friday.
Intelligence officials say Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, one of the two top deputies of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar, was arrested in Quetta on Monday, the highest-ranking Afghan militant to be captured since the fall of the Taliban regime.
The Taliban media machine has dismissed the report of his arrest as a ‘rumour’. A militant spokesman claimed to have spoken with Akhund by phone on Friday.
“'There is no truth in the report. I have told you, I have talked to him. He is in Afghanistan,” Qari Yousuf Ahmadi told the AP by satellite phone from an undisclosed location.
In December, the Taliban issued a similar initial denial of the killing of another top Omar lieutenant, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, who was later confirmed to have died in a Nato airstrike in southern Helmand province.
Gen Mohammad Zahir Azimi, spokesman for the Afghan defence ministry, said if Akhund’s arrest was confirmed, it would affect the Taliban’s command and control system.
“He was a very important person in the Taliban movement,”' Azimi said. “'It will be a big blow to Taliban morale.”
Akhund’s capture is a success, yet government spokesmen either declined to take calls on Friday or refused comment -- a cagey approach that likely reflected concerns over how the news would be received.
While Akhund’s arrest is a feather in Pakistan’s cap as a key ally in the US-led war on terror, it also exposes an awkward truth that it has repeatedly sought to deny: that Afghan militant leaders hide not just in its border regions, but its cities too.—AP
