Pakistani Taliban Chief Vows Attacks on U.S. in Video

Hakimullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader reported killed in a U.S. missile strike four months ago, appeared to have emerged alive in a video to warn that his group will attack major American cities.

Taliban fighters “have penetrated the terrorist America,” and “the time is very near when our Fidaeen will attack the American states in their major cities,” said Mehsud in a nearly nine-minute video found on the Web by IntelCenter, an intelligence firm based in Alexandria, Virginia. English subtitles on the video cite Mehsud giving the date as April 4, while Mehsud, speaking in his native Pashto, says it is April 19.

The video is one of three Taliban messages that constitute the group’s first declarations of direct attacks on the U.S., and that emerged following the May 1 attempted car bomb attack in New York City’s Times Square. It appears to be “an official release from the TTP’s Umar Studio,” or video department, IntelCenter said, using the acronym for Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the movement’s Urdu-language name.

The SUV packed with gasoline, propane canisters and fireworks failed to explode in the center of Manhattan. Investigators in New York have “no evidence” to corroborate a Taliban claim yesterday that it attempted the car bombing, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

In its emergence over eight years, the Pakistani Taliban has focused attacks on Pakistan’s government and military, which it accuses of killing civilians and misrule in the ethnic Pashtun tribal districts that are the main Taliban stronghold.

Drone Strikes

Claims it is targeting the U.S. might lead the Obama administration to escalate missile strikes by U.S. unmanned aircraft that patrol Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, said Nusrat Idrees, who heads the political science department at the University of Karachi. “There may also be a resurgence in demand from the Americans that Pakistan needs to do more to fight terrorists,” he said.

Any escalation of Pakistan’s war on the Taliban is unlikely to be significant “since operations are already ongoing,” said Imtiaz Gul, director of the Islamabad-based Center for Research and Security Studies.

It remains “questionable” whether the speaker in the video, flanked by masked Taliban fighters holding rifles, is indeed Hakimullah Mehsud, said Gul. Hakimullah, who has not been seen since Pakistani officials said in January he was killed in a U.S. missile strike, has a brother who closely resembles him, Gul said. “Unless a very close source who is able to differentiate between them confirms this, it will remain unclear,” he said.

Afghan War

In the video, the speaker cites a list of U.S. offenses against Muslims, including the killing in August of the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. Hakimullah Mehsud was elected as Baitullah’s successor and has allowed the expansion of the Taliban’s target list to include American forces fighting the Afghan Taliban movement.

Baitullah and Hakimullah Mehsud aren’t related and use the name of their Pashtun tribe as a surname.

IntelCenter and the SITE Intelligence Group of Bethesda, Maryland, yesterday reported a separate video in which a Taliban spokesman, Qari Hussein Mehsud, said the attempted car bombing in Times Square was the group’s vengeance for the killings of two al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq. U.S. and Iraqi forces killed Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayoub al-Masri, the main al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq, on April 18, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

CIA Killings

Qari Hussein and other Pakistani Taliban spokesmen, who operate clandestinely in Pakistan, couldn’t be reached by phone for confirmation of the report.

U.S. officials last year dismissed a claim by Baitullah Mehsud to have ordered a shooting rampage in Binghamton, New York, that killed 13 people. A Vietnamese immigrant gunman shot former classmates and teachers at an English-teaching center before killing himself.

In January, Hakimullah Mehsud was shown in a video meeting with Hammam Khalil Al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor who on Dec. 30 detonated a suicide bomb at a Central Intelligence Agency base in Khost, eastern Afghanistan, killing seven CIA operatives.