Thread: Taliban leader Mullah Mansour likely killed in airstrike

Washington (CNN) - Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour was likely killed in an airstrike in Pakistan on Saturday, two U.S. officials told CNN.

One of the officials said the strike occurred around 6 a.m. ET Saturday morning in a remote area of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, southwest of the town of Ahmad Wal.

Mansour was the target of the strike, and a second adult male combatant traveling with him in a vehicle also was likely killed, the official added.

U.S. officials are still assessing the results, the official said. The second source, a senior administration official, said it would likely take days to get "physical confirmation" because of the remote location.

The strike was carried out by multiple unmanned aircraft operated by U.S. Special Operations forces. There was no collateral damage, the first official added.

President Barack Obama authorized the strike.

The Pentagon confirmed the strike in a statement but didn't say whether Mansour was killed.

"Mansour has been the leader of the Taliban and actively involved with planning attacks against facilities in Kabul and across Afghanistan, presenting a threat to Afghan civilians and security forces, our personnel, and coalition partners," Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said in the statement. "Mansour has been an obstacle to peace and reconciliation between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban, prohibiting Taliban leaders from participating in peace talks with the Afghan government that could lead to an end to the conflict."

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the more hawkish Republicans in the Senate, welcomed the news in a statement and urged Obama to not withdraw troops from Afghanistan "until conditions on the ground permit their withdrawal."

"I'm glad to hear we decided to bring the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, to justice. Mansour has terrorized the Afghan people as well as coalition forces," Graham said. "I appreciate President Obama for authorizing the attack. And job-well-done to the members of our military and intelligence communities who carried out the mission."

Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, added, "If verified, the death of Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour would be an important victory in the fight against terror and welcome news to our military personnel in Afghanistan and the Afghan government."

The Taliban revealed last summer that Mansour assumed command following the death of longtime leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who died in Pakistan in 2013.

Mansour formerly headed the leadership council of the Taliban and Islamic scholars, also known as the Quetta Shura, which is composed of longtime leaders who direct the Taliban's operations from Pakistan's Balochistan province, according to the Jamestown Foundation, a global research and analysis group.

According to the U.N. Security Council sanctions list, Mansour previously was the Taliban's minister of civil aviation and transportation and was considered "a prominent member of the Taliban leadership."

"He was repatriated to Afghanistan in September 2006 following detention in Pakistan. He is involved in drug trafficking and was active in the provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika in Afghanistan as of May 2007. He was also the Taliban 'Governor' of Kandahar as of May 2007," the U.N. document said.

He was an active recruiter in the Taliban's fight against the Afghan government, and before his appointment as Omar's deputy in 2010, he was chief of military affairs for a regional Taliban military council that oversees operations in Nimruz and Helmand provinces, the United Nations said.

CNN's Elise Labott contributed to this report.

Taliban leader Mullah Mansour likely killed in airstrike, U.S. officials say - CNNPolitics.com

via Twitter @AFPAfPak

Meet the new boss - Same same but different


Taliban new leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada is seen in an undated photograph, posted on a Taliban twitter feed on May 25, 2016, and identified separately by several Taliban officials, who declined be named. Social Media via Reuters

Naming of new Taliban chief seen dimming Obama's hopes for Afghan peace talks

The selection of a hard-line cleric as the new Taliban chief on Wednesday all but dashes U.S. President Barack Obama's hopes for opening peace talks before he leaves office, one of his top foreign policy goals, current and former U.S. defense and intelligence officials said.

The Taliban leadership council tapped Mullah Haybattulah Akhundzada, a conservative Islamic scholar from the group's stronghold in southern Afghanistan, to succeed Mullah Akhtar Mansour, four days after Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike.

U.S. officials had called Mansour a major impediment to peace talks, and some had expressed hope his death would eliminate an obstacle to peace negotiations between the Taliban and the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

Instead, some experts said, Akhundzada is likely to pursue aggressive attacks throughout the summer, intensifying the pressure on Obama to reconsider his plan to withdraw U.S. military trainers and special forces and leave the decision on how to end America's longest war to his successor.

Late last year, Obama announced he would keep 9,800 U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan through most of 2016. He added that U.S. troops would be drawn down to 5,500 by the start of 2017.Obama has made extracting the United States from its 15-year war in Afghanistan a top priority, unsuccessfully pursuing efforts to bring the Taliban into talks with successive Afghan governments.

"Prospects for the Afghan peace process remain poor. The Taliban leadership, including the new commander, Mullah Akhundzada, believe military victory is only a matter of time," said Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution expert and former CIA officer who headed Obama's first Afghanistan policy review.

Riedel said Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency also believed that the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan for five years before their ouster in a U.S.-led invasion in 2001, could win a military victory.

"The war is entering a more violent phase," he added, his prediction punctuated by a suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 11 people shortly after Akhundzada's selection was announced.

TROOP PLAN UNDER REVIEW

Confronted with Taliban gains, a weak Kabul government and the emergence of an Islamic State branch, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is reviewing the withdrawal plan and is expected to complete his findings within a month.

The administration remains committed to its strategy of pressing for peace talks while providing funds and military advice, training and equipment to Afghan forces, said Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who indicated the U.S. troop drawdown would resume.

The Taliban should realize "that they cannot win, that the Afghan security forces aided by us are going to be stronger than them and are going to be able to defend the state of Afghanistan and the government of national unity there, and therefore that the alternative to coming across and making peace with the government is their certain defeat on the battlefield," Carter said on Wednesday in Rhode Island.

But current and former U.S. government experts and independent analysts said they saw little chance of that happening, with one U.S. defense official noting the Taliban announcement of Akhundzada's accession made no mention of negotiations.

'WHAT HAVE THEY BEEN SMOKING?'

“Whenever I hear anyone in the administration talking about the prospects for peace negotiations or how killing Mullah Mansour could improve them, I have to ask what they’ve been smoking," a U.S. military officer with extensive experience in Afghanistan, said on condition of anonymity.

"Regardless of who leads them, the Taliban have zero incentive to negotiate on their determination to restore their brand of Islamic rule."

He and other U.S. military and intelligence officials pointed out that the Taliban had been making steady battlefield gains against Afghan security forces, who have been suffering high casualty rates.

Moreover, the coalition government brokered by the United States between Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, his former rival and now the country's chief executive, is riddled by disputes and deeply unpopular.

The insurgents have little reason to trust the coalition government or Obama's successor, who takes office in January, to keep any agreement, said a U.S. official with experience in Afghanistan.

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay, Idrees Ali, Yeganeh Torbati and John Walcott; Editing by John Walcott and Peter Cooney)

Naming of new Taliban chief seen dimming Obama's hopes for Afghan peace talks | Reuters

"Taliban leader Mullah Mansour likely killed in airstrike"

So looking at those pictures, another way to put this is that America killed two men riding in a vehicle, but aren't quite sure whom they are. Hopefully they weren't nobodies on their way to buy some hummus.

^Taliban have confirmed they killed the right guys, Bob.

Not that it matters much, as a new, and worse, one has already filled the slot.

Speculation abounds over new Taliban chief's leaked photo

Kabul (AFP) - An ordinary, albeit strikingly clear, headshot of the secretive Afghan Taliban's newly appointed chieftain has triggered a flurry of speculation over the motive behind its release.

A picture of Haibatullah Akhundzada was unofficially circulated on social media soon after he was declared the new Taliban leader on Wednesday, taking jihadi watchers by surprise.

Only a grainy image of Mullah Omar, the insurgent group's secretive one-eyed founder who died two years ago, was published and the Taliban released a coarse handout photo of his successor Mullah Akhtar Mansour.

So why was a high-resolution portrait photo, showing Akhundzada with a salt-and-pepper beard, circulated just days after Mansour was incinerated in a US drone strike in Pakistan? And who was behind it?

Those questions have prompted an international avalanche of social media speculation.

"If u were the Taliban wld u want (pictures) of your leader splashed around so he can be droned easily?" one Twitter user said.

"Oh hey look the Taliban have released a picture of their latest hellfire-missile-bait leader," said another.

A member of the Taliban's media commission sought to downplay the speculation, saying the picture was taken more than 12 years ago when Akhundzada went on hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.

"Now Akhundzada is an old man with a white beard but we cannot release his latest picture for security reasons," he told AFP.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid added another layer of intrigue, telling AFP the group had not intended to release his picture but was forced to confirm its authenticity after it made a splash online.

"We don't know who did it," he told AFP.

Taliban expert Rahimullah Yousafzai suggested the picture may have been released by insurgent sympathisers rather than the group.

"The new Taliban chief is an Islamic scholar and he too will not like a picture of his in the media," he said.

"But now that it has been published they have no way to take it back."

The clarity of the image has led some to speculate that intelligence agencies were behind its circulation.

"The clear portrait shot... looks like something from the archives of a security agency," one Western official in Kabul told AFP.

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, almost all electronic products were outlawed as un-Islamic.

Photographs of living things were illegal and ownership of a video player could lead to a public lashing.

But the Taliban have avidly embraced electronic communication and social media in recent years as a recruitment tool and to promote their propaganda.

"We know that we can't go forward without the help of media," the member of the media commission said.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/speculati...151730018.html

Brother of man killed in U.S. strike on Taliban chief files police report

The brother of a man killed alongside Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a U.S. drone strike in southwest Pakistan has filed a report with police asking for his brother's killing to be investigated, officials said on Sunday.

Muhammad Azam, a Pakistani citizen, was driving Mansour from the Pakistan-Iran border to Quetta, capital of Pakistan's Balochistan province, when a U.S. drone destroyed the car in the Koshki area of Noshki district, killing them both.

Azam was a regular taxi driver on the route and was not connected to the Taliban, his brother Muhammad Qasim said in a police report seen by Reuters.

The "First Information Report" filed by Qasim would form the basis of any police investigation into the drone attack.

Drone attacks outside Pakistan's tribal areas, such as the one that killed Mansour and Azam, are rare.

Much of the country's Islamist militancy is based in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. Critics of drone strikes allege there has been a tacit agreement between Islamabad and Washington allowing strikes in some tribal areas but not elsewhere. Pakistan denies that any such agreement exists.

The report was filed by Qasim on Wednesday, local official Muhammad Omar told Reuters on Sunday night.

It does not name Mansour, identifying him only as Muhammad Wali, an identity he had been using while in Pakistan, complete with identification documents and a passport.

Pakistani authorities confirmed for the first time on Sunday that it was indeed Mansour who was killed in the drone strike.

"He was identified after conducting a DNA test which showed a match with a close relative of Mullah Mansour's, who had come to Pakistan from Afghanistan to receive the body," said an interior ministry statement.

The police report filed in Balochistan notes that the United States has claimed responsibility for carrying out the attack. No individuals or officials are named as suspects.

A U.S. embassy spokesman in Islamabad declined to comment, referring all questions on the subject to Washington.

"My brother was innocent. And he was extremely poor. He has four young children. He was the sole breadwinner in his house," Qasim told police, according to the report.

(Writing by Asad Hashim; Additional reporting by Kay Johnson; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Brother of man killed in U.S. strike on Taliban chief files police report | Reuters

Family of driver killed in US strike on Taliban leader file criminal case | World news | The Guardian

Goog job too.

The family of a taxi driver who was killed in a drone strike while driving the leader of the Afghan Taliban across Pakistan have lodged a criminal case against the US government.

Mohammad Azam was killed on 21 May while unwittingly taking Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor from the Iranian border to Quetta, the capital of Balochistan.


Mullah Akhtar Mansoor obituary
Read more
The unprecedented attack has thrown into uncertainty possible peace talks with the Taliban as well as US-Pakistan relations.

It has also devastated the family of Azam, who had been working for more than eight years as a driver in Taftan, a tiny desert town next to an important border crossing with Iran.

“He was the sole breadwinner of our large joint family, this was an attack on our family that hardly earns enough for two meals a day,” said Mohammad Qasim, Azam’s older brother.

Azam supported his wife, four children, and a disabled brother called Yar Muhammad.

A week after his death his children remain distraught and tearful. They describe their father as a “martyr”.

“Who will feed them now?” asked Qasim. “I appeal to the civilised world, including all those human rights bodies, to investigate the brutal murder of my brother and compensate his children.”

500 Afghan afghani should sort it.

Oh dear, don't the Taxi drivers widow and Family know that Allah will take care of them by the Muslim faithful.
Marry off the widow to an older brother.
Sorted.