According to Trowbridge the airstrike was part of a month-long operation against ISIS carried out by USA and Afghan special operations forces this past July in southern Nangarhar province. Nangarhar province has been a hotbed for ISIL-Khorasan activity since the summer of 2015.
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IS increased its activities in Afghanistan since a year ago.
Saeed Khan masterminded attacks including the group’s first ever deadliest in Kabul last month, killing almost 80 people belonging to Hazara community.
Hafiz Saeed Khan was killed on July 26 in the Achin district of Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province, said Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Gordon Trowbridge in a statement.
Between January and early August, American warplanes conducted almost 140 air strikes against Islamic State targets in Afghanistan, according to the US military. A similar claim surfaced past year from Afghan intelligence agents, but the report was never confirmed.
Khan was declared a terrorist by the State Department past year, dubbing him the IS head of the “Khorasan province”.
The Pakistani helicopter, owned by the government of Punjab, was headed to Russian Federation for overhaul as it crash-landed in eastern Afghanistan earlier this month. He was formerly a commander of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), but switched allegiance to the Middle-East based IS in October past year.
USA forces are directly attacking the militants under their counterterrorism mission and Special Forces advisers are helping Afghan forces in operations against the militants as part of the overall mission to assist the country’s military.
Various Taliban factions and their al Qaeda allies – who vehemently oppose al-Baghdadi’s claim to lead a nascent global caliphate – still control vast, overlapping networks of finance from opium, kidnappings and taxes on areas under their sway.
Afghan security officials had claimed the killing of Saeed Khan but their claims later proved to be incorrect.
Afghan authorities erroneously believed Saeed had been killed in another strike in July 2015, when a US drone targeted dozens of IS-linked cadres in Nangarhar, close to the Pakistani border.
A spokesman for the USA -led mission in Afghanistan said the equipment was lost when US forces had to move a casualty collection area because they came under fire and denied that any USA personnel had been captured.
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News of his death comes after former Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in another USA drone strike inside Pakistan in May. That is a decrease in number from 3,000 in January.
