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.
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“Of course he wanted the foreigners out of Afghanistan, but Mullah Mansoor consistently told Mullah Omar that war was not the solution in Afghanistan“, Mujda said.
“When Mullah Omar became the emir, there was a huge gathering in Kandahar, significantly inside Afghanistan, that gave him legitimacy in his claim to be the leader”, said an Afghan official.
Negotiations with the Afghan government, scheduled for Friday, were postponed on the Taliban’s request as they searched for their new leader.
The Haqqani Network has also suffered a lot recently owing to the deaths of Maulvi Bakhta Jan and Maulvi Sangeen Zadran.
The election, which was reported yesterday, has not been officially confirmed by the Taliban.
In Kunduz, insurgents have been active since late April, and are believed to have joined forces with other militant groups in their attempts to take control of the strategic province. Omar’s 26-year-old son, Yaqoob, and other hardliners oppose the peace talks, according to a recent story by a veteran Pakistani journalist with close ties to the Taliban.
“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. But according to the dissenting terrorists as quoted by The Associated Press, instead of taking a vote of “all Taliban commanders”, the leadership vote was confined to only a “small number of leaders”. “It’s not clear if Mullah Omar had much, if any, influence left at the time of his death, and many believe he’d been reduced to a symbolic figurehead”, wrote correspondent Tom A. Peter.
The Afghan government said it regretted the postponement of the second formal face-to-face meeting with the Taliban.
In the 1980s, Jalaluddin was close to the American CIA and Pakistani intelligence to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
Mansour leads the Taliban’s strongest faction and appears to control most of its spokesmen, websites and statements, said Graeme Smith, senior Afghanistan analyst for the think-tank worldwide Crisis Group. Wolf said this will pose a challenge to the new Taliban leader.
The Haqqani network was one of several militant groups that operated from the tribal regions along the Afghan-Pakistan border following the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan, which began in 2001.
The announcement also said the Taliban’s two “deputy heads” would be Maulavi Haibatullah Akhunzada, the Taliban’s former chief justice, and Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the of the Haqqani network and the son of its founder.
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To another question about the first round of talks that was held in Murree, Aziz said that talks were held in a cordial atmosphere and Taliban demanded removal of sanctions, release of their prisoners and certain confidence building measures, adding there was positive response from all sides including, the US and the Afghan government.
