The Foreign Office of Pakistan confirmed the death of Taliban leader, Mullah Mansour on Thursday in a USA drone strike near the Pak-Afghan border.
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Within an hour of the announcement of Haibatullah Akhundzada’s appointment, a Taliban suicide bomber attacked a shuttle bus carrying court employees west of the Afghan capital, Kabul, killing up to 11 people and wounding several others, including children. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, making good on its vow to target government workers in Kabul’s judiciary.
While solidarity within the group seems elusive at the moment, the Taliban making peace with local governments is a hope the US has held for years, and continues to work toward.
The US killing of Mansour showed that Washington has at least for now abandoned hopes of reviving the direct peace talks between Kabul and the Taliban, which broke down last summer. “In less than a year, peace process has been scuttled twice”, the Pakistani adviser said, adding that Pakistan believes there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan.
US President Barack Obama, while commenting on the selection of a hardline cleric as the new Taliban chief, said that it had dashed the US hope for peace in the war-torn country.
Video has emerged apparently showing the Afghanistan Taliban’s new leader, mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, accepting an oath of allegiance from tribal scholars and elders.
A breakaway faction led by Mullah Rassoul rejected Akhundzada’s appointment, saying he was selected without any broad consultation with field commanders in Afghanistan. Rasool’s splinter group is based in western Afghanistan near the border with Iran, and has fought fierce battles in the south with Mansour loyalists.
The Taliban’s supreme council held emergency meetings that began on Sunday in southwest Pakistan to find a unifying figure for the leadership post.
Mullah Omar, driven from power when USA -led forces invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, was believed to have been about 53 when he died.
He pressed that the drone strike was a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty as well as breach of principles of the United Nations Charter governing the conduct of states.
Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, one of two deputies to late Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour, was announced as the emir of the insurgent army. He is known for public statements justifying the Taliban’s extremist tactics and their war against the Afghan government.
He was close to Mullah Omar, who consulted with him on religious matters.
Akhundzada, from a deeply religious family in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province, also attracted harsh criticism from factional rivals within the Taliban, who previously opposed Mansour. The insurgents have been fighting to overthrow the Kabul government since 2001, when their own Islamist regime was overthrown by the US invasion. He served as a deputy to Mansour, and was the lead justice when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from the mid ’90s to the early ’00s, when USA forces invaded the country and toppled the group. But he is believed to have run the movement in Mullah Omar’s name for more than two years.
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Earlier on Tuesday, Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar said a relative of Mullah Mansoor, who has blood relationship with Mansoor, had come forward to claim the body of a man named Wali Muhammad who got killed together with a local driver named Muhammad Azam in the US drone strike over the weekend.
