A CIA drone strike may have killed the operational commander of the Haqqani network, the insurgent group behind some of the most high-profile attacks on Western and Afghan government targets in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence officials and militant sources said on Saturday.
The officials said Badruddin Haqqani, who is also believed to handle the network’s vital business interests and smuggling operations, may have been killed during a drone strike this week in Pakistan’s tribal North Waziristan region. “Our informers have told us that he has been killed in the drone attack on the 21st but we cannot confirm it,” said one of the Pakistani intelligence officials.
If Badruddin’s death is confirmed, it could deal a major blow to the Haqqani network, one of the United States’s most feared enemies in Afghanistan, where it is allied with the Taliban. “We are 90 percent sure that he was in the same house which was attacked with a drone on Tuesday,” said another Pakistani intelligence official.
Sources close to the Haqqqani network also said Badruddin was believed to be in the house, hit by a drone strike as militants were planting explosives in a vehicle meant to be used for an attack on NATO forces in Afghanistan. “The drone fired two missiles on the house last Tuesday and killed 25 people, most of them members of the Haqqani family,” one of the sources said.
Pakistani Taliban and tribal sources said they believed Badruddin was killed in the drone attack. One of Badruddin’s relatives said he was alive and busy with his “jihad activities”. “Such claims are baseless,” he told Reuters.
A series of drone strikes in North Waziristan this week suggest the CIA, which remotely operates the aircraft, was after a high-value militant target in the unruly area.
The deaths of militants in such strikes are difficult to confirm because they often occur in remote areas of regions in the northwest like North Waziristan that are hard for authorities to reach.
