On Sunday, the Taliban issued a written statement purportedly quoting Jalaluddin Haqqani, the leader of the notoriously brutal Haqqani insurgent group, in an effort to quell rumors about his death and further support Mansoor.
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The brother of Mullah Mohammad Omar on Sunday joined a growing chorus of opposition to the opaque selection of the late Taliban leader’s successor, indicating widening rifts within the militant group as it weighs whether to revive peace talks or intensify its 14-year insurgency in Afghanistan.
The Taliban announced that Mullah Mansoor was their new leader on Thursday and released a purported audio statement from him on Saturday in which he called for unity and warned of enemy propaganda aimed at dividing the group. “This is a big responsibility for us”.
“The nightmare is if nobody respected the leadership anymore in the Taliban”, said Graeme Smith, a senior analyst at the global Crisis Group who is based in Kabul, “because then you have no one to talk to”.
An Afghan Taliban splinter faction called Fidai Mahaz, which first leaked the news of Omar’s death few days ago, claimed Saturday that the Taliban’s founder was in fact poisoned to death. The 30-minute speech attributed to Mansoor was emailed to The Associated Press by the Taliban’s spokesman. “I have no differences with new Amir Mullah Akhtar Mansoor and all such reports are baseless”.
Mojda said that most Taliban members understood the need to hide Omar’s death for the sake of their cause and did not hold it against Mansour or his backers in the Taliban national council, but sources in Pakistan said the rank and file Taliban, especially those in the battlefield, had been increasingly concerned and suspicious about his prolonged absence.
“Our goal and slogan is to implement sharia law and an Islamic system, and our jihad will continue until this is done”, he said in the message. Both instances point to the shadowy existence and functioning of the underground Taliban and Haqqani organisations.
We will serve the new leader if he is elected with consensus but will not support anyone including Mullah Akhtar Mansoor if the leaders failed to demonstrate unity.
Last week the Taliban confirmed Omar had been dead for some time. There is no shortage of possible candidates – Pakistani intelligence officials who prefer continuous war in Afghanistan to ensure a limited Indian footprint in the country, rivals of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who opposes a reconciliation process that entails Pakistan playing a leading role, or hard-line, anti-peace Afghan Taliban figures, who prefer to stay on the battlefield, where great gains have been made as of late.
In response to the Afghan government’s announcement Wednesday that Omar had died, the Taliban pulled out of the long-awaited peace talks that were scheduled to take place on Friday, hosted by the Pakistani government.
It was widely believed that it was Mansoor who had sent the top three Taliban leaders to sit in face-to-face discussions with the representatives of the Afghan government in Pakistan on July 7. Mullah Omar was driven out of power after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to in order to destroy Al Qaida for its September 11, 2001 attacks on the US.
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Haqqani is the leader of the Haqqani Network, a terrorist group based in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas that is believed to have conducted many bloody attacks inside Afghanistan. A day later, the Taliban confirmed that Omar had died, but said little about the timing and claimed that he had never left Afghanistan, which he governed from 1996 to 2001. “Haqqani… was ill but has been blessed with good health for a prolonged period now and has no troubles”, the Taliban said on their website.
