By Hamid Shalizi KABUL (Reuters) – The Afghan government is looking warily at the conservative religious scholar who has assumed leadership of the Taliban, seeing in him a rigid proponent of hardline orthodoxy who is unlikely to favor peace talks, officials said. A day after the Afghan Taliban announced that Haibadullah Akhundzada would take over after Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan, officials on Thursday were trying to form a picture of a leader best known for relentlessly applying strict sharia, or Islamic law. In his former role as one of the Taliban insurgency's senior judges, he was responsible for issuing a series of death sentences against opponents of Mansour, according to General Abdul Razeq, police chief of Akhundzada's home city of Kandahar.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/afghanistan-sees-taliban-leader-rigid-conservative-uninterested-peace-154224737.html

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