Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the militant Haqqani network, one of the most powerful and feared groups in the Afghan insurgency, has died after a long illness, the Taliban said on Tuesday.

Haqqani, who founded the network in the 1970s, gave up operational leadership of the group some years ago to his son Sirajuddin, who is now deputy leader of the Afghan Taliban, with a $5-million U.S. bounty on his head.

“Haqqani had become quite old and was suffering from different health problems,” said one Taliban source close to the Haqqani family.

The Taliban issued a statement on Haqqani’s death but did not say where or when he died but said he had been ill and bed-ridden for several years.

Defence ministry spokesman Mohammad Radmanish said the death was not expected to mean any major change for the Haqqani network, blamed by Afghan and U.S. security officials for some of the most devastating suicide attacks of the past decade.

“Operationally, his death will not have an impact on the group,” he said, adding that Haqqani’s role in recent years was ideological rather than practical.

Haqqani achieved prominence as a guerrilla leader in the U.S.-backed campaign against Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan during the 1980s but later allied himself with the Taliban, fighting American troops after the Taliban were ousted in 2001.

Haqqani is considered to have introduced suicide bombing to Afghanistan, where it was previously unknown, and his group became notorious for complex, well-organised attacks on both Afghan and U.S. military, as well as civilian targets and high-profile kidnappings.

Last year, a bomber believed to have been sent by the network blew himself up in the heart of the government and embassy district in the Afghan capital Kabul, killing about 150 people.

With hopes for peace talks raised by an unprecedented ceasefire in June, news of the death of one of the most notorious militant commanders comes at a sensitive time for both the Taliban and Kabul’s Western-backed government.

Jalaluddin Haqqani’s death has been reported a number of times over recent years and the reports have never been disproved.

A security official in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be quoted by name, said Afghan intelligence services believed that Haqqani had in fact died some three years ago.

The official said the announcement of the death should be seen in connection with increased pressure from the United States on Pakistan over U.S. accusations Pakistan is not doing enough to defeat militant groups on its territory.

U.S. and Afghan officials have long said the group was based in Pakistan’s border region of North Waziristan, was for years close to al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and operated with the support of Pakistani intelligence services.

Pakistan has rejected that accusation and has pointed to the network’s early links to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as it grew in strength during the anti-Soviet Mujahideen war of the 1980s.

No comment was immediately available from the Pakistan.

NEW YORK: A breakthrough in DNA analysis is helping identify more victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York, but the scientific advance is of little consolation for families of those whose remains may have been buried in a Staten Island landfill.

The official death toll in the attacks on lower Manhattan’s World Trade Centre is 2,753, including the missing and presumed dead. Only 1,642 of them, or about 60 percent, have been positively identified.

The New York City Medical Examiner’s Office has worked for 17 years to identify the remaining 1,100 victims. Using advances in DNA extraction techniques over the past five years, it has made five more identifications.

The advances have been bittersweet for 9/11 families who unsuccessfully fought to stop the city from making a park out of Staten Island’s enormous Fresh Kills landfill, where 1.8 million tons of Twin Towers debris was dumped and buried.

“We are grateful that the identification continues, but there is more material that could have been part of that had the city not been so cavalier with us,” said Diane Horning, who led a failed court battle by a group called World Trade Centre Families for Proper Burial that hoped block the park project.

Horning led the group, although her son Matthew was one of those identified early on. Matthew, 26, a database administrator for an insurance company, was working the 95th floor of the North Tower when the planes hit.

New York’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals found in 2009 that accusations that the city had mishandled the remains at Fresh Kills amounted to “lack of due care,” which was not sufficient to successfully sue the city.

New York officials said at the time that the city did not intend to be insensitive or offend victims’ families.

To create the park, Fresh Kills Landfill was covered with layers of soil and other materials to prevent the release of toxic gas from decomposing trash into the atmosphere, according to the Freshkills Park Alliance, New York City’s nonprofit partner in developing the park.

Charles Wolf lost his wife Katherine on September 11 and her remains have not been identified.

If they are in the sealed landfill, he considers it “God’s will” and he is “at peace” with it.

“What’s the remedy? Dig everything up and risk exposing all those toxins again to the environment?, Wolf said. “No, that’s not the answer, because all of a sudden now the cure is worse than the disease.”

SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH

The ability to identify more victims is the latest chapter in a saga of pain that began on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when two airliners crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre.

Destruction of the Twin Towers was part of the coordinated hijackings of four airliners by al-Qaeda militants that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and western Pennsylvania, where one of the planes crashed in a farm field. The attacks triggered an escalation of U.S. military involvement in the Middle East that persists to this day.

A scientific breakthrough in the extraction of genetic material was made this year and announced by the New York City chief medical examiner last week, as the 17th anniversary of the attacks approached.

The new technique places bone fragments in a chamber containing liquid nitrogen to make them more fragile so they can be pulverized into fine powder. The more a bone is pulverized, the more likely it becomes to extract DNA.

It is the latest effort in the largest forensic investigation in U.S. history, involving a medical examiner’s team of 10 scientists working on remains once thought too degraded from jet fuel, heat and other conditions to undergo testing.

“We’re going back to the same remains that we’ve tried five, 10, 15 times,” Mark Desire, who heads the Medical Examiner’s crime lab, said in the briefing last week.

“We are making DNA profiles from remains we had no hopes of identifying in the past,” he added.

Wolf, who was not among those who opposed the Freshkills Park project, was gratified by the renewed effort.

“It warms my heart that possibly there will be remains found for people who still want them,” he said.

“I’ve gone through a lot of trauma with nothing to grieve over,” Wolf said, choking up in a telephone interview. “I remember watching Nancy Reagan touch her husband’s casket. I miss not having that.”

Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is on the brink of losing the two main centres of his ‘caliphate’ but even though he is on the run, it may take years to capture or kill him, officials and experts said.

Islamic State fighters are close to defeat in the twin capitals of the group’s territory, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and officials say Baghdadi is steering clear of both, hiding in thousands of square miles of desert between the two.

“In the end, he will either be killed or captured, he will not be able to remain underground forever,” said Lahur Talabany, the head of counter-terrorism at the Kurdistan Regional Government, the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq. “But this is a few years away still,” he told Reuters.

One of Baghdadi’s main concerns is to ensure those around him do not betray him for the $25 million reward offered by the United States to bring him “to justice”, said Hisham al-Hashimi, who advises Middle East governments on Islamic State affairs.

“With no land to rule openly, he can no longer claim the title caliph,” Hashimi said. “He is a man on the run and the number of his supporters is shrinking as they lose territory.”

Iraqi forces have retaken much of Mosul, the northern Iraqi city the hardline group seized in June 2014 and from which Baghdadi declared himself “caliph” or leader of all Muslims shortly afterwards. Raqqa, his capital in Syria, is nearly surrounded by a coalition of Syrian Kurdish and Arab groups.

The last public video footage of him shows him dressed in black clerical robes declaring his caliphate from the pulpit of Mosul’s medieval Grand al-Nuri mosque back in 2014.

Born Ibrahim al-Samarrai, Baghdadi is a 46-year-old Iraqi who broke away from al-Qaeda in 2013, two years after the capture and killing of the group’s leader Osama bin Laden.

He grew up in a religious family, studied Islamic Theology in Baghdad and joined the Salaafi jihadist insurgency in 2003, the year of the US-led invasion of Iraq. He was caught by the Americans who released him about a year later as they considered him then as a civilian rather than a military target.

BOUNTY

He is shy and reserved, Hashimi said, and has recently stuck to the sparsely populated Iraq-Syria border where drones and strangers are easy to spot.

The U.S. Department of State’s Counter-Terrorism Rewards Program had put the same $25 million bounty on Bin Laden and Iraqi former president Saddam Hussein and the reward is still available for Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Neither Saddam nor Bin Laden were voluntarily betrayed, but the bounties complicated their movements and communications.

“The reward creates worry and tension, it restricts his movements and limit the number of his guards,” said Fadhel Abu Ragheef, a Baghdad-based expert on extremist groups. “He doesn’t stay more than 72 hours in any one place.”

Baghdadi “has become nervous and very careful in his movements”, said Talabany, whose services are directly involved in countering Islamic State plots. “His circle of trust has become even smaller.”

His last recorded speech was issued in early November, two weeks after the start of the Mosul battle, when he urged his followers to fight the “unbelievers” and “make their blood flow as rivers”.

U.S. and Iraqi officials believe he has left operational commanders behind with diehard followers to fight the battles of Mosul and Raqqa, to focus on his own survival.

It is not possible to confirm his whereabouts.

Baghdadi does not use phones and has a handful of approved couriers to communicate with his two main aides, Iyad al-Obaidi, his defence minister, and Ayad al-Jumaili, in charge of security. There was no confirmation of an April 1 Iraqi state TV report that Jumaili had been killed.

Baghdadi moves in ordinary cars, or the kind of pick-up trucks used by farmers, between hideouts on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border, with just a driver and two bodyguards, said Hashimi.

The region is well known to his men as the hotbed of the Sunni insurgency against U.S. forces that invaded Iraq and later the Shi’ite-led governments that took over the country.

At the height of its power two years ago, Islamic State ruled over millions of people in territory running from northern Syria through towns and villages along the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys to the outskirts of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.

It persecuted non-Sunnis and even Sunnis who did not agree with its extreme version of Islamic law, with public executions and whippings for violating strict controls on appearance, behaviour and movement.

But the group has been retreating since in the face of a multitude of local, regional and international forces, driven into action by the scores of deadly attacks around the world that it has claimed or inspired.

A few hundred thousand people now live in the areas under the group’s control, in and around Raqqa and Deir al-Zor, in Syria’s east, and in a few pockets south and west of Mosul. Hashimi said Islamic State was moving some fighters out of Raqqa before it was encircled to regroup in Deir al-Zor.

Mosul, with pre-war population of 2 million, was at least four times the size of any other the group has held. Up to 200,000 people are still trapped in the Old City, Islamic State’s besieged enclave in Mosul, lacking supplies and being used as human shields to obstruct the progress of Iraqi forces by a U.S-led international coalition.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, made of Kurdish and Arab groups supported by the U.S.-led coalition, began to attack Raqqa last week, after a months-long campaign to cut it off.

The militants are also fighting Russian and Iranian-backed forces in Syria loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, and mainly Sunni Muslim Syrian rebels backed by Turkey.

The last official report about Baghdadi was from the Iraqi military on Feb. 13. Iraqi F-16s carried out a strike on a house where he was thought to be meeting other commanders, in western Iraq, near the Syrian border, it said.

Overall, Islamic State has 8,000 fighters left, of which 2,000 are foreigners from other Arab states, Europe, Russia and central Asia, said Abu Ragheef.

“A small number compared to the tens of thousands arrayed against them in both countries, but a force to be reckoned with, made up of die-hards with nothing to lose, hiding in the middle of civilians and making extensive use of booby traps, mines and explosives,” he said.

The U.S. government has a joint task force to track down Baghdadi which includes special operations forces, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies as well as spy satellites of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

It will take more than that to erase his influence, Talabany said. “He is still considered the leader of ISIL and many continue to fight for him; that hasn’t changed drastically,” he said, using one of Islamic State’s acronyms.

Even if killed or captured, he added, “his legacy and that of ISIL will endure unless radical extremism is tackled.”

Ayman al-Zawahri Issues a Stark Warning Showing Real Tensions on the Ground

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri urged rival jihadist fighters in Syria to unite or risk death but again decried fellow Sunni Muslim militants Islamic State as “extremists” in an audio recording posted online on Sunday.

As successor to Osama bin Laden, Zawahri has the allegiance of al Qaeda branches in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. But the group’s dominance is being challenged by Islamic State, which controls territory in Syria and Iraq and  followings in Libya and Yemen.

In Syria, al Qaeda offshoot Nusra Front and Islamic State are the two most powerful groups fighting government forces. Once a single group, they split in 2013, largely due to a power struggle among leaders.

“We have to want the unity of the Mujahideen in Sham (Syria) so it will be liberated from the Russians and Western crusaders. My brothers … the matter of unity is a matter of life or death for you,” Zawahri said.

The authenticity of the recording, the first since January, could not be immediately verified, but it had the hallmarks of previous Zawahri tapes. In January, the Egyptian former doctor called for revenge after Saudi Arabia executed dozens of militants.

He is believed to be hiding in a border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On the recording, Zawahri lambasted a U.N.-backed political process to find a solution in Syria, and praised Nusra Front, which controls most of Idlib province.

Nusra is also part of an alliance of Islamist brigades known as Jaish al Fateh, which is leading battles against Syrian government forces and its Russian- and Iranian-backed allies in the southern Aleppo countryside.

In January, Nusra Front tried unsuccessfully to convince rival Islamist factions to merge into one unit, including the powerful Ahrar al-Sham.

Zawahri also emphasised once again the ideological divide between al Qaeda and Islamic State, which is fighting a Western-led coalition and Russian forces while also clashing with Western-backed rebels and the Syrian army.

He described them as “extremists and renegades” whose followers would eventually disavow their beliefs and methods.