The Taliban’s high command has yet to issue a statement at its propaganda website, Voice of Jihad, on Osama bin Laden’s death. But an Afghan Taliban commander known as Dawran Safi claimed to have formed “special units for avenging the martyrdom” of bin Laden. From Al Jazeera (via a translation received by LWJ):
These men did not wait for their supreme command to comment on the loss of their ally – one during whose lifetime they did not abandon – and made clear threats to avenge him less than two days after it was announced that he was killed by the United States. Field commander Dawran Safi, who heads a council for coordinating among armed groups in eastern Afghanistan, said that bin Ladie’s death generated a new driving force for following in his footsteps.
“We created special units for avenging the martyrdom of Sheikh Osama bin Laden. We will avenge him and follow in his footsteps, and we will maintain the momentum of the jihad against foreign and agent forces.”
There is a Taliban commander who operates in Kunar who is known as Haji Mohammad Dawran Safi (he also goes by the name of Qari Dawat). It is unclear if he and the Safi quoted above are one and the same. That commander was targeted in an ISAF airstrike in December 2009, but he survived. He was responsible for the kidnapping of Paul Refsdal, a Norwegian journalist, in November 2009.
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5 Comments
Hmm they don’t say who they want to take out revenge on. Shouldn’t Taliban be encouraged to think the ISI had a role? For that matter shouldn’t AQ be encouraged to think that the Taliban will sell them out now that OBL is gone.
Same people, doing the same work, only now they are called a
“We will avenge him and follow in his footsteps” Meaning: Special forces will hunt you down in the middle of the night, put a bullet between your eyes and then dump your carcass in the ocean to sleep with the fishes for eternity.
Sounds good to me.
what was this commander doing before? they have said many times they want to “take revenge” for everything from Taliban leaders dying to drone strikes.
ask them where the “revenge attacks” are from the many times they said they’d take revenge for the drone strikes?
in reality they have been reduced to just bombing markets filled with women and children, which changes nothing of the taliban’s fate, they still will be tracked down and killed one at a time, for the next 50 years…
bunch of dogs yapping because they can’t bite anything. yawn….
“We mean it this time.”
If this was not serious, that would be funny indeed. Sounds like little kids.
Speaking for myself, I certainly would not want to follow in OBL’s footsteps.
I wish the media would be picking up on the absolutely stupid quick release of info on the treasure trove of intel. As I posted earlier this week, the only decent explanation (which seems to have been proven not to be the case) would have been if there really had not been any treasure trove at all, and the announcement was simply to stir up communications and movement . . . .