A top Pakistani Taliban Commander Abdul Wali Mohmand, still referred to as Omar Khalid Khorasani, has been killed in a roadside target bombing with his vehicle in the Afghan Province of Paktika on the border of Pakistan.Mohmand was behind some of the deadliest attacks in recent years, therefore his killing has majorly given the Islamist militants a blow delivery.
The Pakistani Taliban on Monday confirmed the death and said the group would soon issue a longer statement on the killing.However , Mohmand was not the only one killed as two other commanders at least were also killed in the bombing on Sunday .
This comes a week after a U.S. drone strike in Kabul had killed al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri.Khorasani is thought to have been close to al-Qaeda’s founding leader Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, but it wasn’t immediately known if there was any link between the drone strike and the bombing. 
The U.S. State Department had Mohmand on its wanted list and had offered a bounty of up to three million dollars for information on his whereabouts.
At one point, Khorasani broke away from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an umbrella organization for several Islamist groups, and formed his group, Jamaat ul Ahrar .
His group had some of the deadliest attacks thereby killing a lot including a bombing in the eastern city of Lahore in 2016 that killed at least 75 people from the minority Christian community on an Easter Sunday.Khorasani later dissolved Jamaat ul Ahrar and rejoined the TTP in a group drive to reunify several estranged groups.
He is described as a former journalist and poet who studied at several madrasas in Pakistan.There has been a fragile truce holding between Islamabad and the TTP for the past two months as peace talks brokered by the Afghan Taliban’s Haqqani network take place.Meanwhile, the TTP has killed nearly 80,000 Pakistanis in almost two decades of violence.
