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, appointed 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.