“Mansour was being closely monitored for a while”.
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Pakistan has not officially reacted to the strike, but Afghan officials confirmed the killing.
The Taliban’s splinter group, which emerged in opposition to Mullah Mansour’s leadership, would likely be reconciled by a new leader.
The Department of Defense issued a statement to the media via email saying Mansour was “the leader of the Taliban and actively involved with planning attacks against facilities in Kabul and across Afghanistan, presenting a threat to Afghan civilians and security forces, our personnel and coalition partners”. The group controls or has a significant presence in around a third of the districts across the country, holding more territory than at any time since US forces toppled the Taliban government in the months following the 9/11 attacks.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said Mansour had become “an obstacle to peace and reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Taliban, prohibiting Taliban leaders from participating in peace talks with the Afghan government”.
“If people want to stand in the way of peace and continue to threaten and kill and blow people up, we have no recourse but to respond and I think we responded appropriately”, he said.
Mansour was the target of the strike, and a second adult male combatant traveling with him in a vehicle also was likely killed, the official added.
The top commander of USA forces in the Middle East says the killing of the Taliban’s supreme leader presents a hard dilemma for the militants in Afghanistan.
“We have had longstanding conversations with Pakistan and Afghanistan about this objective with respect to Mullah Mansour, and both countries’ leaders were notified of the airstrike”, he said.
According to the statement, the man named Wali Muhammad carried a Pakistani passport and an ID card showing he was a resident of Qilla Abdullah, a district in Balochistan province where the United States launched in the strike.
One of the militant group’s senior commanders also told the Associated Press news agency that Mansour had died in “the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area” after he was targeted by an unmanned American drone.
A longtime deputy of previous Taliban leader Mullah Omar, officials believe Mansour had been the de-facto leader of the now somewhat fractured group since Omar’s death a few years ago.
The ministry noted that representatives from Pakistan, Afghanistan, the United State and China agreed as recently as last week that “a politically negotiated settlement was the only viable option for lasting peace in Afghanistan and called upon the Taliban to give up violence and join peace talks”.
Some Afghan analysts believe that Haqqani, known for employing especially brutal tactics against coalition forces and foreigners, is now well positioned to assume full control over the Taliban.
In December, Mansour was reportedly wounded and possibly killed in a shootout at the house of an insurgent leader in Pakistan.
On Friday, David Petraeus, the former commander of USA forces in Afghanistan and former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, called for loosening restrictions on US airstrikes against Afghan Taliban fighters.
This is not the first time that the death of Mullah Mansour has been reported.
Earlier, Pakistan’s Urdu TV channel Samaa in a report on Sunday claimed that those killed in the United States drone strike were a taxi driver and a passenger, and not Mullah Mansour. I salute the skill and professionalism of the US Armed Forces who carried out this mission.
“It is the one force most able and willing to turn Afghanistan into a terrorist safe haven once again”, he said. The office of Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president, also announced the death.
“If Pakistan would play a more constructive role, we could destabilise the Taliban far more rapidly”, Corker said.
Hailing from the southern province of Kandahar province he was once civil aviation minister during the Taliban’s rule in the country.
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If Pakistan failed to act, he warned, Afghanistan would call for “responsible global entities” to “act outside of Afghanistan against the criminals whose hands are stained in the blood” of Afghans. In subsequent years, as the Taliban mounted an increasingly bloody assault against global troops and Afghanistan’s foreign-backed government, Mansour slowly rose up the group’s ranks, eventually emerging as the Taliban’s acting head in the two years during which Omar’s death was kept secret.
