"Habib-ur-Rahman Mansour Faizabad mayor"

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Anti-Taliban NRF Claims Killing of Faizabad's Taliban-Appointed Mayor in Bomb Attack

The Pakistan Times — Islamabad, August 14, 2026

The Taliban-appointed mayor of Faizabad, capital of Afghanistan's northeastern Badakhshan province, was killed Thursday when a bomb targeted his vehicle in the city's old quarter. The National Resistance Front, the anti-Taliban armed group founded by Ahmad Massoud, claimed responsibility for the attack on X, saying its forces carried it out and that the mayor's guards were also killed.

According to a nurse at Badakhshan's provincial hospital who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity, Habib-ur-Rahman Mansour died after the explosion struck his vehicle. A municipality employee, also speaking anonymously for safety reasons, said the bomb had been planted near the mayor's workplace. Eyewitnesses told Afghanistan International the vehicle caught fire and was destroyed in the blast, which the NRF says happened roughly 100 metres from the Badakhshan governor's office. Mansour himself was originally from Maidan Wardak province, not Badakhshan.

This is the second senior Taliban official killed in the province in under three weeks. Zabihullah Amiri, head of Badakhshan's information and culture department, was shot dead on the Baharak-Faizabad road on July 28 while traveling to his office, an attack claimed by the Islamic State's regional branch, ISIS-Khorasan, rather than the NRF. Taliban police had said two gunmen on a motorcycle carried out that earlier killing.

Badakhshan has become an increasingly active front in Afghanistan's low-level insurgency against Taliban rule. Beyond these two targeted killings, the province also saw the Sepahiyan-e Mihan Front briefly seize Yaftal district, which a Taliban spokesman downplayed as a minor threat that was brought under control within hours, along with unrelated clashes in May when security forces moved to destroy opium poppy fields, killing two people including a teenager. The remote, mountainous province has also grown into an important mining hub under Taliban administration since 2021.

The NRF has been active across nearly 20 Afghan provinces since Ahmad Massoud founded it following Kabul's fall in 2021, positioning itself as the successor to the old Northern Alliance. The group claimed over 400 targeted operations nationwide between March 2024 and March 2025 alone. Despite that claimed operational tempo, a UN report from May said armed opposition groups collectively posed no significant challenge to the Taliban's overall control of the country, a assessment this latest high-profile killing may complicate, at least for how security in Badakhshan specifically is being perceived right now.

Read More:

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Sources: AFP, Afghanistan International, 

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