No Taliban spokesperson was immediately available for comments.
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According to the BBC, four people were killed in the firefight in the city of Quetta that seriously wounded Mansour. “He was rushed to hospital and we are not sure if he survived his wounds”, media outlets quoted Faizi as saying.
He said five senior Taliban members died on the spot and over a dozen including Mullah Mansour suffered serious bullet injuries.
The meeting was at the home of Abdullah Sarhadi, a commander in Mansour’s group and a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who had been arrested after 2001 by the United States, then released, the Taliban sources said.
“During the discussion, some senior people developed differences and they opened fire at each other”, a senior Taliban commander said.
Sarhadi was detained again later on by Pakistani forces, then released in 2012. It had denied for some two years that reclusive, longtime leader Mullah Omar had died.
In this archival picture, Taliban militants stand on a hillside at Maydan Shahr District of Wardak Province, west of the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Mullah Mansour’s appointment prompted schisms after its creator Mullah Omar’s departure emerged in July in the Taliban. Omar was killed in 2013, but his death only made public in July.
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The conflicting accounts deepen the confusion over the already opaque leadership situation in the Taliban following the death of the movement’s founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and cloud prospects for any resumption of stalled peace talks.
