Talks delayed due to request by Afghan Taliban after Mullah Omar’s death

Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor will serve as the group’s new leader, the Taliban confirmed in a statement Friday.

A Taliban official said the process to choose Omar’s successor had several stages: the group’s ruling council would choose a candidate who must then be approved by a college of religious clerics.

According to the United Nations Security Council sanctions list, Mansour is considered “a prominent member of Taliban leadership” and was the Taliban’s minister of civil aviation and transportation.

“He was repatriated to Afghanistan in September 2006 following detention in Pakistan”.

His support mainly comes from the southeastern Great Paktia zone, which includes the Paktia, Paktika and Khost provinces.

Dam said Taliban sources described Mansor as “reasonable” and a leading figure in opposition to former al-Qaeada leader Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

The confirmation of the death of Omar and new reports of of Jalauddin’s demise will have an impact on the Pakistan-hosted peace efforts between militants and Afghan government.

Preparations had been under way for the next round of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, provisionally planned for Thursday or Friday in a location yet to be confirmed. He has been given the title of “The Leader of the faithful”.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Dam said: “There are many within the Taliban who have been wanting a leader who is involved in day-to-day operations that they can go directly to for guidance”.

Fourteen years after they were driven out of power, the Afghan Taliban are facing their biggest challenge.

On Thursday, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said it was postponing the talks due to the “uncertainty” surrounding Mullah Omar’s death but gave no new date for the negotiations.

Whether Pakistan had indeed shared the highly classified information with President Ghani, whom it began to trust after more than a decade of misgivings with the Afghan leadership, chiefly Hamid Karzai, is not known, or probably may never be known.

On Wednesday, Afghan officials said Omar died in April 2013 in a hospital in the southern Pakistani city Karachi, but left open speculation that the death carried what they called a ” suspicious nature”.

The White House said in a statement that his death “represents a chance for yet more progress on the path to a stable, secure Afghanistan”. Schultz said the intelligence community was looking into the reports. Haqqani “died of a brain haemorrhage a year and half ago”. In fact, he played nearly no role in operational decision-making after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. “The challenge for ISIS was not that numerous rank-and-file of those organizations did not sympathize with it but that they felt tied to their groups by a binding pledge of allegiance”, Hassan said, using another acronym for ISIL.