Luck runs out for notorious Taliban commander

By Saeed Ali Achakzai

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Feared Taliban military commander Mullah Dadullah survived war wounds and evaded capture for years but on Saturday his luck ran out.

He was killed in the southern province of Helmand by the Western troops he had repeatedly vowed to expel.

The militant commander, who was about 40, lost a leg in a landmine blast during fighting in the 1990s but that didn't dampen his zeal for jihad, or holy war.

"He was very kind to us but very brutal to enemies," a close aide to Mullah Dadullah told Reuters on Sunday. Mullah is a title for a Muslim cleric that many senior Taliban use.

Dadullah was an ethnic Pashtun from the southern province of Uruzgan and studied in Kandahar.

During the Taliban's 1996-2001 rule he earned a reputation as a ruthless commander who ordered revenge massacres of Shia Muslim ethnic minority Hazara people in Afghanistan's central highlands.

Towards the end of Taliban rule he was put in charge of the north of the country where most people loathed the hardline Islamists.

An enthusiastic enforcer of the Taliban's strict Islamic code, residents of the north said Dadullah made a point of throwing the first stone on the many occasions he sentenced women to death by stoning for "prostitution".