Afghanistan: Taliban announces identity of Mullah Omar’s successor

The Afghan government said he died in a Pakistani hospital more than two years ago.

An editorial in the News worldwide said that Mullah Omar, who led the Taliban after it seized power in Kabul in 1996, lived in secrecy.

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 peace talks between the representatives of Afghan government and the group were suspended on the request of Taliban.

The family of the man who led an insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of civilians also asked “Muslims to forgive him if anyone’s rights were violated during his time in the Islamic Emirate”.

Under Omar’s leadership, the Taliban offered haven to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, precipitating the U.S. military action in Afghanistan after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

The split over the peace process has been worsened by the emergence of a local branch of the Islamic State group, which last year declared a “caliphate” across large areas of Iraq and Syria under its control.

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. With the revelation that Mullah Omar is dead, Taliban members are suddenly finding new opportunities for disagreement and dissent.

According to the Afghan Biographies website, the newly appointed Taliban leader was born in 1960 in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, the birthplace of the Taliban located along the country’s border with Pakistan. The group is allied with al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban and cooperates with other terrorist organizations in the region. Later, addressing the JuD members, Saeed said Omar was “a great asset as he played an important role in the defeat of the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces in Afghanistan“.

“Mullah Omar had not been seen in public since 2001, with both the US and Afghanistan claiming many times that he was hiding in Pakistan”. The Pakistani government, which was to host the meeting, said the negotiations were indefinitely postponed.

“If anyone does not obey the new chief of the Taliban then he will be not in the Taliban”, he said simply.

Afghan officials confirmed that the Taliban are divided on peace talks.

Following Mansoor’s election, the Taliban chose Sirajuddin Haqqani as its new deputy leader, the Taliban sources said.

Sources said that as Jalaluddin Haqqani, due to his illness and age factor, had handed over operational command of the network to his son Sirajuddin Haqqani, so his death would be of little effect on the group’s activities. That can be seen clearly in the propaganda poetry that the Taliban use to celebrate their successes, says Felix Kuehn, an expert on Afghan culture and politics.