The Afghan government and a senior Taliban commander yesterday confirmed that the extremist group’s leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, has been killed in a US drone strike.
Mullah Abdul Rauf, who recently reconciled with Mansoor after initially rebelling against his ascension to the leadership, told reporters that Mansoor died in the strike late on Friday last week “in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area.”
Afghanistan’s intelligence service on Saturday afternoon announced that Mansoor had been killed in an air attack.
In a statement, the National Directorate of Security, as the secret service is known, said the attack took place in southwestern Pakistan’s Balochistan province.
It is believed to have been the first drone strike on Balochistan, which could explain why Mansoor was traveling in an unarmored car without a convoy, decoys or bodyguards.
Ahead of the official confirmation of Mansoor’s death, US Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking in Myanmar yesterday, repeatedly referred to him in the past tense.
Mansoor “posed a continuing imminent threat to US personnel in Afghanistan, Afghan civilians, Afghan security forces” and members of the US-NATO coalition, he said.
He said the airstrike on Mansoor “sends a clear message to the world that we will continue to stand with our Afghan partners.”
“Peace is what we want, Mansoor was a threat to that effort,” Kerry said. “He also was directly opposed to peace negotiations and to the reconciliation process. It is time for Afghans to stop fighting and to start building a real future together.”
Mansoor formally led the Taliban after the announcement last summer of the death of Mullah Omar, the movement’s founder.
Mansoor, Omar’s deputy, concealed the Taliban founder’s death for more than two years and ran the Taliban in his name until the death was revealed by the Afghan government.
The revelation caused wide fissures in the movement that Mansoor worked hard to mend.
Rauf was an early detractor of Mansoor’s, but decided earlier this year to declare loyalty to him in the interest of unifying the movement.
Speaking live on TV as he chaired a Cabinet meeting, Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah said Mansoor’s death would have a positive impact on attempts to bring peace to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have been waging an insurgency for 15 years.
Mansoor was “the main figure preventing the Taliban joining the peace process,” Abdullah said. “From the day he took over the Taliban following the death of Mullah Omar, he intensified violence against ordinary citizens, especially in Afghanistan.”
Mansoor’s death has raised questions about the direction the Taliban will take, after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani last month sharply changed course from pursuing peace to blaming Islamabad for using the Taliban to wage war on Afghanistan.
After taking office in 2014, Ghani prioritized appeasing Pakistani authorities in the hope that they would encourage the Taliban to participate in a dialogue aimed at ending the war. However, overtures to Islamabad failed and earlier this year Mansoor’s Taliban said they rejected peace talks and would not participate.
A four-country process with Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the US appears to have floundered, with Kabul refusing to send a delegation to the most recent round of talks, sending only the ambassador to Islamabad.
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