Afghan Taliban announce Mullah Akhtar Mansour as new leader

An Afghan store clerk shows a calendar with pictures of Afghan leaders including Mullah Mohammad Omar, bottom row, second left, in Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, July 30, 2015. AP Photo

The Taliban announced Mullah Akhtar Mansour as their new leader July 31, marking a historic power transition for the militant movement that has waged a 14-year insurgency in Afghanistan.

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.
 
The anointment of Mansour -- seen as a moderate and a proponent of peace talks -- comes a day after the Taliban confirmed the death of their near-mythical leader Mullah Omar, who led the fractious group for some 20 years.
 
The power transition raises hopes that Mansour's leadership will pave the way for an end to nearly 14 years of fighting as the US-backed Afghan government struggles to contain the Taliban's intensifying summer offensive.    

Mansour, a longtime trusted deputy of Omar, takes charge as the Taliban confronts growing internal divisions and is threatened by the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Middle East jihadist outfit that is making steady inroads in Afghanistan.
 
"After (Omar's) death the leadership council and Islamic scholars of the country, after long consultations, appointed his close and trusted friend and his former deputy Mullah Akhtar Mansour as the leader," the Taliban said in a Pashto-language statement posted on their website.
 
"When Mullah Omar was alive, Mullah Mansour was considered a trustworthy and appropriate person to take this heavy responsibility."  

A Taliban official said the process to choose Omar's successor had several stages: the group's ruling council would choose a candidate who must then be approved by a college of religious...

Continue reading on: