Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Mansour: Man of war, not peace talks

During his brief stint as the Afghan Taliban chief, Mullah Mansour oversaw intensified attacks which left the Afghan police and troops struggling to respond

Mullah Akhtar Mansour, killed by a US drone strike on May 21, took over as head of the Afghan Taliban last July and oversaw intensified attacks which left Afghan police and troops struggling to respond.

Mansour's appointment, following the revelation that the group's founder Mullah Omar had been dead for two years, was initially thought to favour peace talks.

But after becoming leader he repeatedly refused to come to the negotiating table.

US President Barack Obama today confirmed Mansour was killed in the strike in Pakistan's southwestern province of Balochistan, hailing his death as an "important milestone" in efforts to bring peace to Afghanistan.
 

For some Mansour was the obvious choice to succeed Mullah Omar, the one-eyed warrior-cleric who led the Taliban from its rise in the chaos of the Afghan civil war of the 1990s.

Like Omar he was born in the southern province of Kandahar, was part of the movement from the start and was effectively in charge since 2013, according to Taliban sources.

Mansour, born in the early 1960s, spent part of his life in Pakistan along with millions of Afghans who fled the 1979-89 Soviet occupation.

There he reportedly developed links with the country's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which nurtured the Taliban in the 1990s and even now is regularly accused of fuelling the insurgency.

He served as civil aviation minister in the Taliban government which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until it was ousted by a US-led invasion in 2001, when he fled again to Pakistan.

Mansour repeatedly showed a canny ability to navigate between different strands of the Taliban movement, from the Quetta Shura to the "political office" in Qatar to commanders on the ground in Afghanistan.

In order to take the leadership he outmanoeuvred Mullah Yakoub, Omar's son who was favoured by some commanders as new leader but was judged by others as too young and inexperienced at age 26.

But Mansour's leadership got off to a rocky start. After news of Omar's death two years previously was announced by Afghan officials, some insurgents were unhappy at Mansour's deception.

Others accused him of riding roughshod over the process to appoint a successor.