HANOI (Staff Report) – United States President Barack Obama has termed the Mullah Mansour’s death in a drone strike as an important milestone in the efforts to restore peace in Afghanistan.
In a statement issued on Monday, Obama also urged the remaining Taliban leadership to engage in peace talks with Afghan government, adding that negotiations were the only real way to end the conflict.
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US president further said that Mullah Mansour had rejected efforts to seriously engage in peace talks with Afghan government to end the decades-long violence in the country, which has taken the lives of countless innocent Afghan men, women and children.
Obama is so far second high profile US official to confirm Mullah Mansour’s death. The Pentagon,on the other hand, still seems reluctant to outrightly claim that the Afghan Taliban chief was killed in Saturday’s drone strike.
Earlier, only Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) had officially confirmed that Taliban chief Mullah Mansour was killed in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, while one Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Rauf also confirmed the death, while talking to Associated Press.
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Pakistani officials, on the other hand, have so far denied that there is concrete evidence confirming Mansour’s killing. They said that according to recovered traveled documents, the dead was a Pakistani citizen named Wali Mohammad.
Further investigation is still underway and a DNA test might be carried out to confirm the identity of the dead body recovered from the attack site.
