When the Taliban overran Kabul inmid-August, seizing power for the alternate time, the times-old riddle over the whereabouts of the movement’s Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada strengthened further.
Whether the senior clergyperson is alive or dead is commodity numerous Afghans are uncertain about, and indeed the most devoted judges have dubieties about who’s really leading the group.
AFP went on the trail of the fugitive leader, and the findings are inconclusive.
On October 30– two months after a Taliban spokesperson claimed Akhundzada was alive and well in Kandahar– rumours swirled in the southern megacity that the”emir” had delivered a speech at a Koranic academy, or madrassa.
Taliban officers gave their stamp of authenticity to his appearance at the Hakimia madrassa, releasing a creaking audio recording lasting further than 10 twinkles.
“May God award the tyrannized people of Afghanistan who fought the apostates and the tyrants for 20 times,”intones an aged and echoing voice, said to be that of Akhundzada.
His public profile had preliminarily been largely limited to periodic written dispatches released for Islamic leaves.
In one of the poorest cities of Kandahar, between a waste- bestrew sluice and a dirt track, two Taliban fighters stand guard in front of the Hakimia madrassa’s blue-and-white gate.
It has come commodity of a attraction since October 30, attracting curious– albeit hypercritically distant– crowds of Taliban sympathizers.
-‘ Watching and crying’-
When the supreme leader visited, he was” fortified”and accompanied by”three security guards”, the madrassa’s head of security Massum Shakrullah told AFP.
” Indeed cellphones and sound reporters”weren’t allowed into the venue, he added.
One of the scholars, Mohammed, 19, said”we all were watching him and were just crying”.
Asked if he could confirm that it was surely Akhundzada, Mohammed said he and his peers were so overjoyed that they” forgot to watch. his face”.
The need for Taliban leaders to keep vanishingly low biographies came especially pronounced in the last decade of war, as deadly US drone strikes multiplied.
Akhundzada rose to the top spot after one similar strike killed his precursor, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, in 2016.
He snappily secured the backing of Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, who called him”the emir of the faithful”.
This countersign by Osama bin Laden’s inheritor helped seal his jihadist credentials with the Taliban’s long- time abettors.
The Taliban have released just one snap of Akhundzada– five times agone, when he took the group’s arm.
And indeed that print, depicting him with a slate beard, white turban and a forceful aspect, was taken two decades prior, according to the Taliban.
The supreme leader’s appearance scotched”rumours and propaganda”about his death, said Maulvi Said Ahmad, who heads the madrassa where Akhundzada reportedly appeared.
He looked” exactly the same”as in the notorious print, said Mohammad Musa, 13, who watched from hence.
-‘ Long been dead’-
Officers of the ousted Afghan governance and numerous Western judges are sceptical, believing that Akhundzada failed times agone.
For them the madrassa visit was a precisely arranged deception.
There’s a precedent– the Taliban pretended author Mullah Omar was alive for two times following his death in 2013.
Akhundzada himself”has long been dead and had no part before the preemption of Kabul”, one security functionary of the former governance told AFP.
He was killed alongside his family in a self-murder attack in Quetta, Pakistan,” about three times ago”, the source believes.
This proposition, occasionally with slight variations, is seen as believable by several foreign intelligence agencies.
A separate indigenous security source told AFP that” nothing would confirm and nothing would deny”Akhundzada’s purported death.
The Pentagon and the CIA, meanwhile, didn’t respond to AFP’s request for comment on the rumours of Akhundzada’s death.
-Prestigious scholar
In Panjwai, a quarter on a vast thirsty table near Kandahar, everyone knows of the Akhundzadas, a line of reputed theologians.
The emir was born in the vill of Sperwan.
“At the time of the Soviet irruption (1979) fighting broke out in the vill and Hibatullah left for Pakistan,”Niamatullah, a youthful fighter and former pupil of the supreme leader, told AFP.
After this first move to Pakistan, Akhundzada came a reputed scholar and earned the title”Sheikh al-Hadith”, a distinction reserved for the most prestigious scholars of the Prophet Mohammed’s aphorisms.
In the early 1990s, as the Islamist insurrection was taking hold in the wake of the Soviet occupation, Akhundzada, also in his thirties, returned to the vill.
He’d hold consultations with callers from”the megacity and from Pakistan”, remembers Abdul Qayum, a 65- time-old townie.
According to particles from his sanctioned memoir, his rise was gradational after the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1996.
After running the original madrassa, he came a judge at Kandahar parochial court, also head of the military court in Nangarhar in eastern Afghanistan until 2000.
By the time the Taliban were forced from power in late 2001, he was heading Kabul’s military court.
Akhundzada also fled to Pakistan, chancing sanctuary in Quetta.
His mastery of Islamic law made him the head of the Taliban’s shadow justice system and the acclaimed coach of a whole generation of fighters who graduated through Quetta.
-‘ Centre of graveness’-
Akhundzada was”the centre of graveness for the Taliban. keeping the group complete”, one Pakistan- grounded Taliban member told AFP.
According to this source, who says he has met the supreme leader three times– the last time in 2020– Akhundzada doesn’t use ultramodern technology.
He prefers to make phone calls on landlines and communicates via letters to the Taliban officers who now make up the government and with whom he retains a strong fellowship.
He’d have given the green light to the final descent against the old governance and kept track of operations from Kandahar, where he’d formerly been discreetly installed for several months, the Pakistani source said.
The continued fear of elimination, indeed after the end of the war with the Americans, explains Akhundzada’s uninterrupted low profile, several Taliban sources say.
And if he were formerly dead, a indigenous security source said, enterprises over the rival Sunni revolutionist group, the Islamic State’s original chapter (IS-K), would in part explain the Taliban concealing the news– as any similar advertisement could prompt desertions.
Still, it’ll factionalise the Taliban and IS-K could take advantage,”he said,”If they advertise Akhundzada is no more and we’re looking for a new emir.
Despite the enterprise, the Taliban contend nothing is untoward.
The emir is” leading in an orderly manner”, a spokesperson told AFP, adding”it isn’t necessary”for him to appear intimately.
