Taliban Name New Leader

No sooner had the Taliban selected a new chief to replace Mullah Omar than deep fractures emerged on Friday, as the former leader’s son said he rejected the choice of successor.

“After (Omar’s) death the leadership council and Islamic scholars of the country, after long consultations, appointed his close and trusted friend and his former deputy Mullah Akhtar Mansour as the leader”, the Taliban said in a Pashto-language statement posted on their website.

Although the Taliban’s official communication channels announced Mullah Mansoor as the new leader, Taliban sources say his leadership is highly contested by some factions which instead favor Mullah Yaqoub, the eldest son of Mullah Omar. The contradictory reports about his death come a day after the Taliban confirmed its founder Mullah Omar had died some time ago.

Afghanistan had said Omar died in April, 2013 in a Pakistani hospital, but Pakistani officials could not confirm that.

Peace talks between the Taliban and the current Afghanistan government, due to be held in and mediated by neighboring Pakistan, have been postponed indefinitely in the meantime. He allied himself to the Taliban after they took power in Kabul in 1996, serving as a cabinet minister.

The Haqqani network is one of the most lethal terrorist organisations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. After the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Taliban, he was put in charge of political and military affairs in the Supreme Council, a seven-member body which takes major decisions. “Yet even by Mullah Omar’s standards, his elusiveness in his final years was remarkable”. “I have no differences with new Amir Mullah Akhtar Mansoor and all such reports are baseless”.

Jalaluddin was a militant leader sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia during the fight against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Further splintering within the Taliban could see more local commanders defect to other extremist groups, such as the Islamic State group, which has taken control of large parts of Iraq and Syria and is believed to have recruited some Taliban as it tries to establish a presence in Afghanistan.

“Mansour is seen as a man of Pakistan – that is why severe differences are going on among the Taliban leadership”, said a midlevel Taliban official.

Similar public meetings to condole Omar’s death will be organised in Quetta and other districts of Balochistan, said Maulana Abdul Qadir Looni, provincial chief of the JUI-Ideological, addressing a press conference in Quetta. “So this is a completely new situation”, said Bette Dam, author of an upcoming biography of the Taliban leader. 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. In fact he may have been dead for the last two years, according to the Afghan government.