Taliban’s Mullah Omar Is Dead, Circumstances Uncertain: White House

In the fall of 2014 and winter of 2015, Afghan officials said, they intercepted two letters written by disaffected Taliban commanders who both referred to the possible death of Mullah Omar.

On July 30, the Afghan Taliban officially confirmed the death of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the movement’s reclusive leader.

Some Taliban are also unhappy at the thought Mansour may have deceived them for over a year about Omar’s death and others accuse him of riding roughshod over the process to appoint a successor. The Taliban have now confirmed Omar’s death without saying when he died.

News reports have highlighted an alleged division between Taliban moderates who favor the peace talks and hard-liners who want to continue the 14-year insurgency.

Officials and militants have said Mansour is a pragmatic man strongly in favour of pursuing dialogue with Kabul to try to end Afghanistan’s long, bloody war.

The US suspected Pakistan of sheltering Mullah Omar and even confronted then President Asif Ali Zardari in 2011 over intelligence inputs that the one-eyed Taliban supremo was being treated at a Karachi hospital, according to a media report.

The statement appears to have spurred speculation throughout the ranks of the Taliban, and the talk quickly prompted Mullah Mansour to begin telling his compatriots that Mullah Omar had died, the report said.

Mansoor has never publicly commented on what was widely seen as a debacle for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces fighting in Afghanistan.

The Taliban reacted to the announcement of the Kabul government by pulling out of peace talks that were scheduled to take place on Friday. The statement did not say when and where he died but said “his health condition deteriorated in the last two weeks”.

The top official in the Afghan government delegation involved in the peace talks with the Taliban, Deputy Foreign Minister Hekmat Khalil Karzai, has said that the Taliban delegation at the first round of talks had the backing of Mansoor.

“The government of Afghanistan believes that grounds for the Afghan peace talks are more paved now than before, and thus calls on all armed opposition groups to seize the opportunity and join the peace process”.

Only last month Mansoor had to issue a statement warning of any split within the organisation and urging everyone to fight under the Taliban flag and no other.

The sources, however, said that the differences still persist within the Taliban leadership.

Mansour formerly headed the council, also known as the Quetta Shura, which is composed of longtime leaders who direct the Taliban’s operations from Pakistan’s Balochistan province, according to the Jamestown Foundation, a global research and analysis group.

Briefing Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs at the Parliament House, the Adviser stated it was a good omen that the new Taliban leadership under Mullah Akhtar Mansour is influential among the Taliban ranks and will carry forward the reconciliation process effectively and efficiently.

Though the Haqqani network has remained part of the Taliban, swearing allegiance to its leadership, it has also been considered to have a great degree of its own operational independence and maintains its own internal structure. The U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture.

Jalaluddin was an ally of Afghan Taliban, whose three out of ten sons were killed in US drone attacks while one was murdered in Islamabad.