A NATO air strike in eastern Afghanistan has killed a commander of the Pakistani Taliban, both NATO and the Taliban said.

Both
sides identified the dead commander as Mullah Dadullah and said several
of his comrades were also killed in the attack on Friday.

A NATO
statement did not say who carried out the assault but the alliance is
alone in having the air power to conduct such an operation. It said Mr.
Dadullah’s deputy, Shakir, was also killed.“Dadullah, also known as Jamal, was responsible for the movement of
fighters and weapons, as well as attacks against Afghan and coalition
forces,” the statement said.It said Afghan and coalition forces
backing the Kabul government had “conducted a post-strike assessment”
and found that there had been no civilian casualties or damage to
civilian property.

Pakistani Taliban officials, as well as
Pakistani intelligence officials said Mr. Dadullah had been killed in a
house in eastern Konar province, along with 12 bodygards. They said he
was the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan’s Bajaur tribal agency, near
the border with Afghanistan.Mr. Dadullah, in his 40s, replaced
Maulvi Faqir Mohammad last year after Mr. Mohammad told the media that
the Taliban were holding peace talks with the government.The
Pakistani Taliban, committed to the same Islamist principles as the
Taliban ousted from power in Kabul in 2001, replaced Mr. Mohammad with
Mr. Dadullah to undercut the secret negotiations,
Taliban commanders
say.Some Pakistani Taliban fighters and commanders were forced to
flee into Afghanistan after the Pakistani army launched a series of
offensives against them in 2008 and 2009.

But they still carry out
cross-border raids on Pakistani armed forces. In June, the Pakistani
Taliban said they beheaded 17 Pakistani soldiers in a cross-border raid.Also,
a CIA drone strike in Pakistan 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
Mr. 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 per
cent 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 Mr. Badruddin was killed in the drone attack.

One of Mr. 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.U.S. officials blame the al Qaeda-linked
network for some of the boldest attacks in Afghanistan, including one on
embassies and parliament in Kabul in April which lasted 18 hours,
killing 11 Afghan security forces and four civilians.

The United
States accuses Pakistan’s intelligence agency of supporting the Haqqani
network and using it as a proxy in Afghanistan to gain leverage against
the growing influence of its arch-rival India in the country.Pakistan denies the allegations.

Militant groups from Afghanistan and Pakistan have formed alliances and often cross the porous border for operations.