What’s more evil than a terror mastermind? A terror mastermind who won’t stay dead.

U.S. officials are casting doubt over whether llyas Kashmiri, commander of the Islamist terror group Harakat ul Jihad Islami (HUJI), actually died in a drone strike last week. Earlier this week, U.S. officials told Reuters, “our working assumption is that he’s still walking around.” This despite the fact that Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik claims to be able to confirm “100 percent” that jihadi boss (and reputed al-Qaida pal) is dead.

Kashmiri was reportedly slain by a U.S. drone hovering over South Waziristan last week. In addition to his history of attacks in Pakistan and India, he allegedly conspired with Mumbai plotter David Coleman Headley to attack the offices of the Danish newspaper responsible for printing the allegedly-offensive Mohammed cartoons. Headley also told a federal court that Kashmiri ordered him to research a plot against Lockheed Martin, mistakenly believing they were the company that manufactured the killer drones over Pakistan.

Adding to doubts over his death, photos purporting to show Kashmiri’s corpse faxed by HUJI to Pakistani news organizations are reportedly fakes. Instead of showing the impressively-bearded face of Ilyas, Pakistani authorities claim they show the clean-shaven mug of Abu Ismail Khan, one of the attackers killed during the Mumbai shootings of 2008.

Moreover, Kashmiri’s profile is still posted on the U.S. government’s Rewards for Justice website along with the promise of a $5 million payout for information leading to his arrest.

If reports of his death turn out to be premature, Kashmiri will join the war on terror’s legion of zombie jihadis — those pronounced dead in drone strikes only to rise again.

Al-Qaida’s chemical weapons expert Midhat Mursi is a fairly good example of the phenomenon. In 2006, Mursi was reported dead in a drone strike in Damadola, Pakistan. A couple of years later, intelligence officials told the Los Angeles Times they believed Mursi hadn’t died, after all, but was working hard on the group’s behalf to obtain weapons of mass destruction.  He was reportedly killed in a subsequent missile attack later that year, with confirmation allegedly coming from a positive identification of his remains.

Kashmiri had already been pronounced dead once before. Pakistani intelligence officials claimed a 2009 drone strike in North Waziristan had felled the al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist only to be embarrassed later when he showed up in an exclusive interview with Asia Times Online a month later.

The confusion highlights one of the enduring problems in the U.S. drone war against al-Qaida. Drones have allowed American intelligence to operate in areas where ground operations are politically and operationally risky. However, operational freedom in the skies hasn’t always translated into clarity below, making precise knowledge about the identity, number and combatant status of the dead hard to come by.

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