KABUL - American daily newspaper the New York Times has published a report indicating that the Supreme Leader of Taliban Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour is a businessman and running businesses in Dubai.

The report cites a person that knows Mullah Mansour as saying that the Taliban leader owns a cellphone company.

The news agency cites some intelligence officials as saying that Mullah Mansour is wealthy by any standard, partly because of his ties to Ishaqzai narcotics traffickers.

One Afghan intelligence official has said that some of the wealth of Mullah Mansour has been frozen by Pakistani officials.

One such time came this year when Pakistan was seeking to broker a round of talks between the Taliban leadership and the Afghan government and wanted Mullah Mansour to go along with it, the official said.

According the NYT, some of the time, he lives in a southern neighborhood of Quetta, Pakistan, known as Satellite Town, in an enclave where he and some other Taliban leaders from the same Pashtun tribe, the Ishaqzai, have built homes, according to interviews with a range of people who know him, including high-ranking Taliban leaders.

The NYT report further states that many of the people interviewed about Mullah Mansour, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending or prompting revenge.

The report reveals that Quetta is not his only option. Although he is on the United Nations no-fly list, Mullah Mansour has repeatedly taken flights in and out of Pakistan, according to a senior Afghan intelligence official. Often, his destination has been Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, where he has a house and several investments under different names, the official said.

Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour took over as the Supreme Leader of Taliban after Mullah Mohammad Mansour was confirmed dead lately.

According to the New York Times, some members of the Taliban regime are surprised of what Mullah Mansour is today.

NYT quotes Mullah Salaam Alizai, who according to the news agency was close to Mullah Omar during the Taliban government in the 1990s and later spent years as an insurgent commander and then joined government, as saying that Mullah Mansour is unpredictable and an opportunist.

“The kind of person who doesn’t have his own ideology, the kind of person who doesn’t care about how much destruction occurs,” he is quoted as saying in a phone interview.

 “If he is told to destroy one road, he will destroy 10, if he is told to kill one person, he will kill 100,” added Mullah Alizai, who reconciled with the government about eight years ago.

NYT has quoted another official of Taliban regime as saying that Mullah Akhtar was a hard-working administrator and that he was not a fundamentalist.

“Mullah Mansour was not a notorious figure and he was not fundamentalist, either,” Maulawi Qalamuddin, who is now on the Afghan government’s peace commission is quoted by the news agency as saying. (KP)