Taliban Say They Will Release Recording of Leader to Prove He is Alive

KABUL, Afghanistan: Taliban officials on Friday strenuously denied claims that their leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, had been killed or wounded and promised to soon release an audio recording of him to prove he was still alive.

The militants' chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, dismissed reports by government officials and rival groups that Mansour had been shot in a gunfight that broke out between rival insurgent factions during peace talks this week. But he also tacitly acknowledged the credibility problem faced by the group, which denied that its previous leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, had died, then finally acknowledged it two years after the fact.

"We have already put efforts into sending our men to get a voice recording of the emir himself in order to avoid the growing confusion and assure the people about his well-being," Mujahid said on Friday, referring to Mansour.

Nevertheless, a growing number of accounts Thursday suggested that the Taliban leader had at least been wounded.

An Afghan government official and two Taliban commanders, all speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Mansour was shot Tuesday in the home of the Taliban's chief judicial official, Qazi Haybatullah, in a suburb of the border city of Quetta in Pakistan, where many leaders of the Afghan Taliban live openly.

The officials said that Haybatullah had convened a meeting between Mansour and Mullah Abdullah Sarhadi, a follower of Mullah Mansour Dadullah, a rival of Mansour's. The officials said the meeting ended in a shootout that was said to have killed Sarhadi and to have either wounded or killed Mansour. (Earlier reports had said that the shooting took place in Sarhadi's home.)

In Pakistan, a senior intelligence official from the province of Baluchistan, which includes Quetta, said the reports that Mansour was at least wounded were credible.

"A storm is in the making, with repercussions for Afghanistan as well as Pakistan," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity, in line with official policy.

One prominent commander with the Haqqani Network, a faction of the Taliban that supports Mansour, confirmed that the leader had been wounded and was being treated in Quetta. But the commander said he did not know how serious the injuries were.

A member of the Quetta Shura, the Taliban's governing body, reached by telephone and asked about Mansour's health, snapped, "Don't ask me about that," then turned off his phone.

Although some Afghan officials were confirming reports that Mansour had been wounded or killed, others were dubious. The powerful police chief of Kandahar, Gen. Abdul Raziq, interviewed Friday, said that he doubted the reports were true.

"Nothing has happened to Mansour and nothing has happened security-wise in his safe place," Raziq said.

Meanwhile, Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, was taking pains to insist that Mansour was "absolutely fine" and that "he wasn't even present in the area where the incident happened." He reiterated that reports of the leader's wounding or death were part of a campaign of "propaganda of the enemy and intelligence agencies trying to sow confusion among the people."

Normally, he said, the Taliban would not go to the extreme of recording Mansour because of the risk of disclosing his location, but the group felt that it was important in this case.

"Since the emir is located in a distant area, we have to be very careful to ensure his safety, and that's why it is taking time to reach out to him," Mujahid said. "Nonetheless, we are trying to get his voice and will be releasing it as soon as we can."

Mujahid's statement amounted to an extraordinarily frank acknowledgment of the Taliban's need to counter reports that they have once again lost their leader. In July, reports of the death of Omar, who had not been seen in years, surfaced among rival factions in the Taliban. But Mujahid and other Taliban officials strenuously denied them - until Mansour, after days of frantically rallying support for his leadership, confirmed that his predecessor had died two years earlier.

Mansour's rise to power led to criticism from some major Taliban figures and to violent infighting. Last month, Dadullah, who had reportedly become allied with the Islamic State, was killed along with hundreds of his men in fighting with the mainstream Taliban, according to accounts from Afghan government officials and Taliban leaders.

A spokesman for Dadullah, Mullah Abdul Manan Niazi, at first denied that the breakaway leader was dead. But this week he appeared to acknowledge it, while claiming that Mansour had also been killed.

In an unrelated event in Afghanistan, the Afghan National Army in central Wardak province killed eight civilians holed up near a mosque when soldiers used heavy artillery to defend against a Taliban attack, according to a spokesman for the provincial police, Abdul Wali Noorzai.

Four of the victims were children, he said. Angry protesters blocked the main highway after the episode but were calmed down by the governor and other officials who convinced them that the shelling had been an accident, Noorzai said.