He takes over from Omar the formal title of “amir-al-mumineen”, or “leader of the faithful, and is “a reliable and suitable person for shouldering heavy tasks”, the insurgent group said in an online statement”.
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It went on to cite analysts who believed that Mullah Omar’s death is a serious blow to the Afghan Taliban.
The Taliban’s regular spokesman could not be reached for comment through normal channels. “So this is a completely new situation”, said Bette Dam, author of an upcoming biography of the Taliban leader.
Negotiations with the Afghan government, scheduled for Friday, were postponed on the Taliban’s request as they searched for their new leader.
The Taliban have ramped up attacks on military and government targets since the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation combat mission ended in December.
But many Taliban, and some Afghan officials, fear the recent talks are a ploy by Pakistan to retain control. Mullah Mansoor has reportedly written a letter to the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, warning his group to stay out of Afghanistan.
As Rubin wrote in the New Yorker on Wednesday: “An increase in terrorist attacks connected to a separatist movement in the Xinjiang Autonomous region, some of whose fighters received training in Pakistan and Afghanistan, had led China to regard the stability of Afghanistan as crucial to its internal security as well as its economic future”. He has entered into a peace process with Kabul, but he has also ordered battlefield commanders to intensify their war, now nearing its 14th year with the deaths of U.S. and other global forces and Afghan civilians in the tens of thousands.
Schultz called on the Taliban to end the bloodshed.
It said that Afghan and American intelligence indicated that Mullah Omar was probably dead by 2013. The few pictures believed to be of him show a middle-aged man with the dark beard and turban that essentially serve as the uniform for senior Taliban cadres.
The militant group said Omar never left Afghanistan, from where he led the movement, a claim at odds with Kabul’s assertion that he died in a hospital in the Pakistani city of Karachi “under mysterious circumstances”.
“We are optimistic”, said the government official.
The Taliban also announced his deputies – Sirajuddin Haqqani, who leads the Taliban-allied Haqqani network and has a $10 million US bounty on his head, and Haibatullah Akhundzada, former head of the Taliban courts. His argument that he kept quiet about Omar’s death in order to avoid demoralisation within the Taliban ranks and file and stop it from falling apart, is not being bought by many.
“These death confirmations and rejections are all part of a big pitch for power within an increasingly fractured and rudderless (Taliban) organisation”, he said, speaking before the palace issued its statement. The reign of the Taliban in Afghanistan was full of many horrors including severe discrimination against and brutal killing of Hazaras and other minority groups and the infamous destruction of the historical statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan.
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He became a cleric before joining the resistance against the Soviet-backed government between 1989 and 1992, and he lost his right eye when hit by shrapnel.
