
Mullah Akhtar Mansoor (1963-21 May 2016) was the leader of the Taliban from 2015, succeeding Mohammed Omar. He was the Minister of Civil Aviation for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, preceding Abdul Rahman. Mansoor was killed in a United States drone strike in Pakistan authorized by President Barack Obama on 21 May 2016 along with another militant. Haibatullah Akhunzada succeeded him as the Taliban's leader.
Biography[]
Akhtar Mansoor was born in 1963 in Karize, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan to a Sunni Muslim Pashtun family of the Durrani tribal confederacy. He joined Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi's insurgent group during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s, and after the war he resumed his religious education. When the Taliban first started, he joined it, and he was made the Minister of Civil Aviation under Supreme Guide Mohammed Omar. In 1997 he was captured by an Uzbek warlord during the Battle of Mazar-e-Sharif, but Omar later traded him out. In 2001 he surrendered to President Hamid Karzai after the United States invasion, and he was allowed to return to his home town, but he secretly continued to fight for the Taliban against the NATO-backed government. While in Quetta, Pakistan in 2007, he joined the Quetta Shura and became a high-ranking Taliban leader. In 2010 he was appointed deputy to Mullah Omar, and on 30 July 2015 he was announced as the successor to Omar, who had died in 2013. Mansoor's appointment was controversial, as Omar's son Yaqoob Omar was favored by many other Taliban leaders for the succession. On 21 May 2016, he was killed when a drone controlled by Green Berets struck a car alongside another Taliban militant in the province of Baluchistan, Pakistan as they returned from a trip to Iran, in the most aggressive US strike in Pakistan since the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. His brutality, refusal to join peace talks, and his threats to attack US forces in Pakistan led to his assassination.