Maulana Fazlullah, the Taliban commander in Pakistan's restive Swat valley, has been critically injured in the ongoing military operations against militants, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Wednesday.
"It has been confirmed that he (Fazlullah) has been hit and seriously injured," Malik said.
Most of the Taliban leaders were hiding because of the military action but the authorities would "bring them out of their hideouts," he said.
"These militants who are sitting in South Waziristan and planning terrorist activities from there, I won't call them Taliban, I would call them 'zaliman' (wrongdoers)," Malik said in an interview.
He said the "unity" among militant factions in the wake of the decision by authorities to target Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan chief Baitullah Mehsud was something the government had anticipated.
Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the leader of a militant faction considered to be pro-government, scrapped a peace deal in North Waziristan and decided to resume operations in retaliation for military operations in the tribal belt.
Malik said: "Be it Gul Bahadur or Commander Nazeer, be it Qari Hussain or Baitullah or Hakimullah (Mehsud), they are all branches of the same tree. They all are hardcore terrorists who should be called 'zaliman' and not Taliban."
The militant commanders had formed small groups which were later united into a larger group called the Tehrik-e-Taliban, he said.
"When these terrorists saw that Pakistan's enemies were giving them a lot of cash and cars and that there is good money in this, then they also involved the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Mohammad in their work. Therefore, what happened as a result was that Al-Qaida transferred all its terrorist activities to the Tehrik-e-Taliban," Malik said.
Asked if there was a possibility of the government holding a dialogue with militants, Malik said the administration had engaged in talks only with moderate elements and the peace deal in Swat was made only because Sufi Mohammad, a religious hardliner, promised he would handle things there and restore normalcy.
He urged the world community and the United Nations to help Pakistan determine who was providing the Taliban money and weapons.
