Taliban Information Minister arrested in Peshawar

Ustad Yasar, who heads the Taliban information division in Afghanistan, has been arrested in Peshawar, Pakistani intelligence officials announced today. Yasar was previously arrested in 2005, again in Pakistan, by Pakistani security forces and was handed over to the Afghan authorities in the same year. In 2007, however, he was released in exchange for Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, who had been abducted by the Taliban earlier that year. Other high-level Taliban operatives released along with Yasar include Mansoon Ahmad, Abdul and Hamdullah Ghaffar, and Mullah Abdul Latif Hakimi, the spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan. All of them remain at large. An unnamed Pakistani security official has said that, at the time of his recent arrest, Yasar was acting under orders from Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, who had sent him to the Pakistani borderlands “to mediate in a dispute between Taliban factions” there. It will be interesting to see if the Pakistanis give US interrogators access to Yasar, and if they extradite him to Afghanistan. [IA]