Hamdullah as Hibatullah; Taliban Puts In Efforts To Show Their Supreme Leader Is Alive

The Former Director of the Afghanistan intelligence agency, National Directorate of Security (NDS), claimed on Monday, that the Taliban is in an effort to portray a man named Mullah Hamdullah as Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s supreme leader.

Rahmatullah Nabil, who published a Twitter thread on Monday with a video from a Taliban seminary in which the group’s flag is displayed, emphasized that the man, Mullah Hamdullah, is the same person who spoke to the people on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr on May 1, 2022, and appeared as the supreme Taliban leader at the Hakimiyah seminary in Kandahar on October 30, 2021.

According to the former spy chief of Afghanistan, the same person may appear in the Taliban Ulema Assembly, a grand assembly that is scheduled to take place in Kabul, as Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada. Only one old photo of the Taliban supreme leader has been released so far, but the group has not been able to prove that he is alive, after more than 10 months in power in Afghanistan.

The Taliban occasionally issue decrees in the name of their supreme leader. In the first months after the fall of Kabul on August 15, 2021, the Taliban's major policies and appointment of senior government officials, including the group’s cabinet members, were attributed to decrees by Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, but later the group attributed minor issues such as devotion of funding for a road to decrees by the Taliban leader.

Last week, Taliban-controlled media and news agencies reported that about 30 businessmen had met with Mullah Hibatullah in Kandahar. A few photos were published of this meeting; however, the Taliban leader was not visible in any one. Pictures released by the Taliban of the alleged meeting with their leader showed a row of men sitting in a relatively luxurious room, without their leader in the frame. The next day, the same men discussed, what they called their meeting with Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, with Amir Khan Mottaqi, the Taliban's acting foreign minister.

Bakhtar News Agency and Afghan National Television, both controlled by the Taliban, then released videos of conversations with a number of men who claimed to have met with Mullah Hibatullah.

The Taliban also released a video showing Sirajuddin Haqqani, the group's acting interior minister, visiting the quake-hit areas of Paktika and attending a telephone call. The Taliban claim that the conversation of Haqqani took place with Mullah Hibatullah.

There was only one blurry image of Mullah Omar, the first Taliban leader when he was alive, which was a screenshot of a video of a ceremony in Kandahar.
Unlike now, during their reign of Afghanistan in the 1990s, the Taliban did not allow the publishing of photos and videos that show the faces of living beings. But it was in 2015 and after confirming the news of their leader's death, the Taliban introduced Mullah Akhtar Mansour as their leader and published a photo of him.

After Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed on his way back to Pakistan from Iran, a man named Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada was introduced as the new leader of the Taliban, who has not been seen since, except for in a portrait.

Foreign intelligence agencies have ruled out the possibility of Akhundzada being alive, but the Taliban continue to insist that he is alive and in charge of the group's affairs, without publishing a photo or video of him.