A top Taliban leader has said he’s alive, denying rumours of his payment that surfaced following reports of an internal split in the Taliban group nearly a month after it took over Kabul.

The Taliban’s deputy preeminent minister Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar appeared in an interview with the country’s public broadcaster on Wednesday and revealed he was “ travelling from Kabul so had no access to the media in order to reject this news”.
This news isn’t true. Thank God I’m absolutely fine and healthy,” he told Radio Television Afghanistan, according to the Associated Press.

“ The news about our internal conflict the media are reporting is also not true. We’ve compassion among ourselves, added than a family. We assure the Afghan nation, Mujahideen, elders, and youth don’t worry and there’s no reason to be bothered.”

The Taliban also released vid footage purportedly showing Baradar at meetings in the southern megalopolis of Kandahar.

Baradar served as the presiding troubleshooter during orations between the Taliban and the US that paved the way for US troop retirement from Afghanistan which was completed in late August, two weeks after the Taliban took over the capital.

Internal tugs-of-war
The denials follow days of rumours that Baradar’s confederates jarred with those of Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the Haqqani network that’s rested near the border with Pakistan and was dissed for some of the worst self-slaughter attacks of the war.
The Taliban have hourly denied the venture over internal divisions.

Baradar, once seen as the likely head of a Taliban government, hadn’t been seen in public for some time and wasn’t part of the sacerdotal delegation which met Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in Kabul on Sunday.

Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada, has also not been seen in public since the conditioned group seized the capital on August 15, although he issued a public statement when it named the group’s new government last week.