Taliban: Mullah Omar died of an illness some time ago

He served as the aviation minister in the Taliban government in the late 1990s.

Mullah Mansour is reportedly not well liked by some high-ranking Taliban commanders.

The network has never confirmed the death of its founder.

Taliban now confirmed that the senior Haqqani had died of illness almost a year ago, as news of his death had been making rounds for almost a month now.

The Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until they were overthrown in a U.S-led invasion in 2001. Only a handful of grainy photographs of him are known to exist, and he rarely spoke to the media or gave public speeches.

“Mullah Mansour is one of the founders of the Taliban movement and he is a moderate, pro-peace, pro-talks person”, Abdul Hakim Mujahid, a former Taliban official and a member of the Afghan High Peace Council, told AFP.

But an equally divided Afghan government needs to take a unified approach to turn the opportunities now available to its advantage, said political analyst Haroun Mir.

“If anyone does not obey the new chief of the Taliban then he will be not in the Taliban”, he said simply. The Times article said Omar moved to Karachi with the help of the ISI in order to avoid unmanned aerial systems airstrikes by the U.S. Omar had previously been living near the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Still, Mansour can not afford to alienate Pakistan, said Saifullah Mehsud of the Islamabad-based FATA Research Centre. “The first round had taken place some weeks ago and had been followed by a statement apparently released by Mullah Omar in which he had welcomed the development”, it said. “In battles with local security forces, the Taliban lost 20 fighters, including their local commander”, he said.

The White House urged the Taliban “to heed [Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s] call for reconciliation and make genuine peace with the Afghan government“.

For Some Mansour Was the Obvious choice to Succeed Mullah Omar, the one-eyed warrior-cleric who led the Taliban from it’s rise in the chaos of the civil war of the 1990s Afghan.

The fissures in the insurgency that have become evident in recent days hint at a growing influence of hardliners who might believe their own propaganda that this year’s battlefield gains signal victory is close. A leader of the Haqqani Network that has ties with al-Qaeda, and is believed to be responsible for numerous deadly attacks in Afghanistan, Haqqani has a $10 million American bounty on his head.

At the same meeting, the Taliban leading council had appointed Moulavi Haibatullah Akhunzada and Mullah Sirajuddin Haqqani as the deputy heads of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the statement further said. “And so keeping that quiet was doable, given the fact that he was largely secretive about his movements as communications for years“. The Foreign Affairs Ministry said Kabul “as always, is committed to the peace negotiations with the Afghan Taliban movement and hopes that the aforementioned meeting will be held in the near future”.

“We are optimistic”, said the government official.