Mullah Omar’s family refuses to back new Taliban leader

Mulla Omar’s brother, Abdul Mannan is already member of the Taliban Leadership Council, though he reportedly didn’t agree to Mansour selection as the new leader in the council’s previous meeting.

An Afghan man reads a local newspaper at a news stand carrying a headline about the new leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, August 1, 2015.

The comments were made as Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani’s administration had said face-to-face talks with Taliban members in Pakistan in early July ended with optimism.

The Taliban named Mullah Akhtar Mansour as their new chief Friday, a historic power transition that raises hopes a more moderate leadership will pave the way for an end to Afghanistan’s bloody war.

The Taliban on Saturday denied reports of the death of the founder of Haqqani network. However, a former Pakistani official tells the Post that some sections of the government may have wished to keep Mullah Omar’s death a secret to preserve Islamabad’s ability to influence peace talks between a united Taliban and Kabul.

“It clearly indicates that the blood relatives of Mullah Omar who insisted that succession should be adopted on the pattern prevailed in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries have distanced themselves from the new set-up”. Afghanistan’s Taliban on Thursday confirmed the death of Mullah Omar, who led the group’s self-styled Islamic emirate in the 1990s, sheltered al-Qaida through the 9/11 attacks and led a 14-year insurgency against U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation troops.

Mannan, a key member of the Taliban council (shura), urged pro-Taliban religious leaders to focus on resolving the deepening splits within the movement rather than backing and pledging allegiance to one leader.

Accorrding to Reuters, the commanders said the long-time deputy of the deceased Mullah Omar was elected at a shura or meeting of top Taliban representatives just outside the Pakistani city of Quetta, where many of them are based. “Our enemy will be happy in our separation”, Mansoor, who is reported to be in his late fifties, said in the message.

If Mullah Mansoor fails to carry the motion collectively, the last word beneficiary might be the Islamic State group, which has established a small however rising presence in Afghanistan over the previous yr, partially by recruiting disillusioned Taliban fighters.

In the revised decision, Mullah Haibatullah who was appointed as deputy chief of Taliban was given another responsibility of looking after political affairs of the movement, including peace deal.

Officials said on Saturday that Taliban gunmen had surrounded a police station in southern Uruzgan province and were holding 70 police officers hostage.

“Mullah Omar has passed away but our religion still exists among us”.

On his deathbed, surrounded by his closest allies, including Mansoor, Omar instructed his aides to attend to his funeral rites but said nothing of alerting his family or others within the ranks of the movement, Mozdah said. The Taliban are the main opposition to the Afghan government, and this weekend, they were supposed to take part in a second round of apparently successful talks with the Afghan government and the Haqqani network about ending the violence in Afghanistan – which has been postponed. The Taliban’s media branch formally proclaimed Mullah Mansour had become the new Amir ul Mumineen-or “the commander of the faithful”-a title Mullah Omar’s followers had bestowed upon him”.

Over the course of the half-hour speech, Mansour repeatedly exhorted his audience to be on guard against factionalism and enemy propaganda that might breed distrust. He vowed that the group would continue fighting, until “we [the Taliban] bring an Islamic rule to the country”.