Cracks Are Splitting the Taliban Leadership Wide Open, and Kandahar Knows It

Leaked audio, purged commanders, and a supreme leader warning his own regime could collapse from within reveal a movement fracturing faster than it can hide it.

A movement that has spent five years demanding absolute obedience from everyone else is now struggling to secure it from itself.

That is the plain reading of a leaked recording obtained by the BBC, in which Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada told a gathering of officials at a Kandahar madrassa in January 2025 that internal divisions could bring the Emirate down entirely.

“As a result of these divisions, the emirate will collapse and end,” he warned, a rare admission of discord at the top of a regime built almost entirely on the appearance of unbreakable discipline.

The structure of that discord is by now well documented. On one side sits Akhundzada’s Kandahar faction, ruling largely from the shadows and pushing Afghanistan toward deeper isolation, with allies controlling the security, religious and administrative institutions responsible for enforcing rigid restrictions on women’s education and public life.

On the other sits a Kabul-based bloc built around Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, former deputy leader Mullah Yaqoob, and Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar, a group still committed to strict Islamic governance but pushing for limited international engagement and economic recovery.

Insiders describe it plainly as the Kandahar house against Kabul.

The clearest test of that tolerance came in late 2025, when Akhundzada ordered a nationwide shutdown of internet and phone services, treating online access itself as un-Islamic.

The blackout crippled public services and commerce within 48 hours. What followed was unprecedented for a group defined by rigid discipline; senior ministers in Kabul pushed back hard enough that Prime Minister Mullah Hassan Akhund authorized restoring connectivity, reportedly under direct pressure from Baradar, Haqqani and Yaqoob.

Analysts described the reversal as open rebellion against a supreme leader whose authority had never before been publicly countermanded.

Akhundzada’s response has not been conciliation; it has been consolidation. He has relocated sensitive functions like weapons distribution to Kandahar, issued orders directly to police units while bypassing the ministers nominally in charge of them, and reshuffled provincial police chiefs under Haqqani’s own Interior Ministry without consulting Haqqani at all.

In one especially pointed episode, Akhundzada deployed loyalist fighters from Kandahar to seize checkpoints at Kabul’s international airport and at Bala Hissar, positions historically held by Haqqani’s network, while Haqqani himself remained conspicuously absent from the country for weeks.

The human cost of this rivalry surfaced most starkly in December 2024, when Khalil Haqqani, the Taliban’s minister for refugees and Sirajuddin Haqqani’s own uncle, was assassinated in a Kabul bombing, the first killing of a senior Taliban figure since the group retook power.

Daesh claimed responsibility, but analysts at the Hudson Institute assessed the more plausible explanation as an inside job tied directly to rising tension between the two factions, noting Sirajuddin Haqqani had recently criticized Akhundzada publicly shortly before the killing. Akhundzada did not attend the condolence prayers.

The most recent turn in this story, as of May 2026, adds a sharper edge to everything that came before it. Sami Sadat, chairman of the Afghanistan Freedom Front and a former Afghan Army general, has assessed that Akhundzada may now be turning toward Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus for support against his own internal rivals.

According to Sadat, envoys have crossed the Durand Line carrying specific assurances that the Taliban would curb TTP activity, arrest key dissenters, and enforce a no-criticism policy toward Islamabad, in exchange for backing against the Yaqoob and Haqqani factions.

Akhundzada’s own public silence amid continued Pakistani strikes and cross-border allegations stands out sharply against field commanders who keep backing attacks on Pakistan and TTP operations, a contradiction that only resolves if Kandahar’s actual priority right now is surviving Kabul, not confronting Islamabad.

If that assessment holds, it marks a remarkable reversal: a supreme leader whose regime has spent months absorbing Pakistani airstrikes and denying responsibility for TTP sanctuary now possibly asking the very state he refuses to acknowledge as striking him for help holding onto power.

A movement that survived twenty years of war on unity is now negotiating its own survival, and the terms it is reportedly offering say more about its internal weakness than anything Islamabad has said about it publicly.