Congratulations Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada. You've been elected by the central Shura of the Taliban as the movement's new Emir, just the third since it was founded.
Congratulations Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada. You've been elected by the central Shura of the Taliban as the movement's new Emir, just the third since it was founded.
Here's what you can expect in the job:
The United States will try to kill you
As a long-standing member of the Taliban's leadership and one of its most influential religious figures, you are a prime candidate for targeting by those ubiquitous drones that drift across the skies along the Afghan-Pakistan border. And not only are they surveying the tribal territories of North and South Waziristan; your predecessor's demise was in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.
You'll have your hands full
You'll need to invest plenty of time holding the movement together. Yes, you were unanimously elected, but so was Mansour -- and his election was followed by plenty of dissent and Mullah Muhammad Rasool's establishment of a splinter group, for example.