ISIS Just Received a ‘Gift’- and Now ‘There’s A Lot of Opportunity for High Drama’

Taliban leader Mullah Omar was officially declared dead this week, and the militant group is showing signs of major strain as a result.

Omar's death could have huge implications that ripple past the Taliban itself — J.M. Berger, a Brookings Institution fellow and coauthor of the recent book “ISIS: The State of Terror,” told Business Insider that this week's news could be a boon to the Islamic State.

Although Omar has apparently been dead for more than two years, until this week the Taliban had been leading people to believe that he was still alive.

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As Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, explained in The Daily Beast, Al Qaeda could also struggle with the news, as the group “made Mullah Omar’s role a central pillar of its response to ISIS’s ideological challenge.”

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