Genocidal axe murderer - a.k.a. Taliban commander - killed in Afghanistan

"Top Taliban commander, Mullah Dadullah" was killed in Afghanistan, reports the Associated Press.

Now who exactly was this guy? According to the AP, he was "a one-legged fighter who orchestrated suicide attacks, beheadings and an ethnic massacre."

As the AP goes on to write, "Dadullah's particular brand of cruelty was unmatched [even] inside the Taliban":

Dadullah's men videotaped beheadings of Afghans suspected of cooperating with international forces or the Afghan government, and the suicide bombers he is believed to have commanded have killed or injured hundreds of Afghan civilians, soldiers and police, as well as dozens of international forces.

In 1999 he led a Taliban massacre of ethnic Hazaras in the province of Bamiyan, where the Taliban in 2000 destroyed two ancient Buddha statues carved into a hillside cliff.

News of his death, not surprisingly, was met with joy - at least in some circles:

"This morning a friend told me that Dadullah had been killed and I wanted to shout out to the people 'Congratulations! Congratulations!' I was so happy I started crying," said Munir Naqshbandi, brother of Ajmal Naqshbandi, the Afghan journalist who was believed to have been kidnapped and beheaded by Dadullah's men last month.

"Dadullah was a cancer on the body of the Afghan people. It is good news for all the people of Afghanistan, not just the Naqshbandi family," he said.

Perhaps even the Taliban might not be mourning his death, suggested Rahimullah Yusufzai, who is described as "a Peshawar-based editor for the Pakistani newspaper The News and an expert on the Taliban." As the AP reports:

Yusufzai said many Taliban fighters had been unhappy with Dadullah, saying he maligned the militant group with his beheadings, a rash of kidnappings and boastful videos that starred himself firing guns and walking in Afghanistan's mountains.

"They thought he had become too big for his shoes," Yusufzai said.

Now that's a real martyr, sacrificing himself for the cause even after his own men had come to despise him.