KABUL, Afghanistan—The new leader of the Afghan Taliban faces the twin challenges of bringing together an insurgency that he ran for years under another man’s name and uniting a fractured movement that has seen fighters desert for more extreme groups such as the Islamic State. Meanwhile, the Afghan government believes it can seize on the Taliban leadership crisis it has created by announcing that Mullah Mohammad Omar has been dead for more than two years to further weaken the insurgency.
As Afghan officials quietly expressed optimism that peace will eventually prevail, the first fissures began appearing Friday in the Taliban’s veneer, when Mullah Omar’s son Yacoob said that he and other senior leaders rejected the manner and the result of the election for a new leader.
“The Afghan government is hoping that in dispelling the myth that Mullah Omar has been making the decisions all these years, that the Taliban will turn in on itself, eat its young and become an irrelevance,” said a diplomat in Kabul.
Without Mullah Omar at the helm, officials and analysts said, the Taliban has lost its ability to compel members into obedience with the religious legitimacy he wielded as “Commander of the Faithful,” who wore a cloak said to have belonged to the Prophet Muhammad.
“The Taliban movement is based on religious, Islamic principles, not on tribal and ethnic principles and as such the decisions of the ruling shuras (councils) should be accepted by all members” as religious edicts, said Wakil Ahmed Muttawhakil, who served as foreign minister in the Taliban’s 1996-2001 administration.
