The Department of Defense confirmed Tuesday that Mullah Abdul Salam, the Taliban’s commander for the province of Kunduz, was killed in an airstrike on Sunday, according to a Voice of America repor?t. The Taliban also confirmed that a remotely piloted aircraft had killed Salam along with four of his top associates in his home district of Dashti Archi, Kunduz. “Mullah Salam and the Taliban fighters under him murdered and terrorized the people of Kunduz for too long,” said Army Gen. John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, according to VOA. Salam is the most senior Taliban leader killed since a US drone strike killed Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, the Taliban leader, in May 2016.
The Defense Innovation Unit is gearing up for the first flight of its commercially developed hypersonic testbed as soon as the end of February—part of a larger project to quickly increase the cadence of the Pentagon’s hypersonic flight testing and field advanced, high-speed systems and components at scale.
