New Taliban leader pledges to continue insurgency in Afghanistan

The brother of Mullah Mohammad Omar on Sunday joined a growing chorus of opposition to the opaque selection of the late Taliban leader’s successor, indicating widening rifts within the militant group as it weighs whether to revive peace talks or intensify its 14-year insurgency in Afghanistan.

On Saturday, the new Taliban leader Mansour called for unity in the movement in his first audio message since becoming head of the group that faces deepening splits following Omar’s death.

Friday the Taliban announced that Haqqani’s son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, had been appointed one of two deputies to Mullah Mansoor, the new leader of the militant group.

“We should keep our unity, we must be united, our enemy will be happy in our separation”. “This is a big responsibly on us”.

At least one Taliban faction would have preferred Mullah Omar to be succeeded by his son. Perhaps the best attempt at conspiratorial conjecture is this: Pakistanis, who reportedly were the ones that passed on the information of Mullah Omar’s death, sought to scuttle the talks and capitalised on their improved relations with Kabul to share the news and encourage the Afghans to broadcast it to the world.

The US long-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.

“I think we are seeing the demise of the Taliban”, said Haroon Mir, an analyst in Kabul. People close to the Taliban said he had challenged Mullah Mansour to prove their leader was alive, contributing to his dismissal.

It is the first time that such differences have arose among the group’s leadership, the report said.

A second round of talks between the government and Taliban was postponed after Omar’s death was reported. Last seven days, in an realistic presentation of those toys conflict in attitude, there really was repeated representing between Afghan official military and Taliban unit in southern the…

A second round of peace talks between the Taliban and the government in Kabul had been scheduled to begin today in Pakistan.

Mullah Omar was the one-eyed, secretive head of the Taliban, whose group hosted Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaida in the years leading up to the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Under Mansoor’s shadow leadership, the Taliban has participated in a series of indirect meetings with government representatives, culminating in last month’s landmark meeting. The decision to reveal Mullah Omar’s death was originally intended to help bridge deepening divisions within the movement, people with knowledge of the Taliban’s inner workings said.

Before his appointment, Mansoor had been directing Taliban operations in Afghanistan against U.S.-led coalition troops since 2001, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad, a senior Taliban commander in Afghanistan, said by phone Thursday. “Our jihad will continue until the establishment of an Islamic regime in Afghanistan”, he said.

Some in the Taliban who knew Mullah Omar well questioned whether some of those instructions could really have come from him.

A police officer was fatally shot during a traffic stop in Memphis Saturday night and a manhunt is underway for the suspect, Tennessee police officials said.