Zealot who destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas

Zealot who destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas
By Kim Sengupta
Published: 14 May 2007
Independent UK

Mullah Dadullah's well-deserved reputation as the most feared of the Taliban commanders was earned on the back of savage and symbolic acts of violence.

But it was the Taliban's dynamiting of two Buddha statues thought to be the world's tallest in the cliffs of Bamiyan - claiming they were an affront to Islam, that sealed his reputation as one of history's most infamous Philistines.

By repeatedly declaring that he was the overall military chief of Taliban forces in Afghanistan, their main link to al-Qa'ida and the architect of the suicide bombing campaign, he made himself an obvious and high priority target. And, unsurprisingly, yesterday there were repeated public statements lauding the successful operation which eliminated the Taliban commander.

But although the killing was of positive propaganda value at a time when not much had been going right for President Karzai and his Western backers, it is unlikely to lead to any immediate change to the Afghan insurgency.

The Taliban do not have a monolithic command and control structure or a centralised operational base. They are, instead, smallish groups who tend to carry out their actions on an independent basis.

The leaders of the insurgency had already learned that putting large-scale forces on the ground can be hugely counter-productive. Last year, the Taliban gathered about 1,500 fighters in the south and asserted that they would take Kandahar, their spiritual home. But it proved a major mistake to try to match Nato forces in conventional battle and hundreds of insurgents were killed and wounded.

Since then, the Taliban have gone back to the tactic of guerrilla attacks, and that is not going to be altered due to the death of Dadullah. Other commanders will step into his shoes, although they may choose to be less high profile than he was.

Some of Dadullah's methods, especially the use of suicide bombers, which killed far more Afghans than Westerners, and the beheading of prisoners, again overwhelmingly Afghan, had led to consternation among many who themselves do not like the presence of foreign troops in their country.

The number of suicide bombings in Kandahar, where they were particularly prevalent, had gone down due to the discovery and dismantling of bomber cells.

The vast majority of the raids by the security forces came from information supplied by members of the public who may, in the past, have chosen not to do so.

Dadullah had also made enemies within his own side. Some factions blame him for engineering the assassination of a rival commander in a Nato air strike by passing on details of his movement through Pakistani connections. Nato military sources claimed yesterday Dadullah's death was the result of tracking his movement through information gained from within the insurgency.

Dadullah's brutal actions as a Taliban commander in the civil war also made him many enemies. Apart from the massacres of civilians, he was also accused of abandoning his troops during the US-led invasion of 2001 and of paying the Northern Alliance $150,000 (£76,000) to secure his escape.