The death of Hafiz Saeed Khan is a blow to efforts by Islamic State to expand into Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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ISIL’s leader in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hafiz Saeed, has been killed in an air strike in Nangarhar province, the Pentagon said.
The drone strike occurred in July, during joint monthlong USA special forces and Afghan military operations against Islamic State in Nangarhar.
Trowbridge’s statement expressed the belief that Khan’s death would negatively affect the Islamic State’s regional recruiting activities, as well as their other operations in that region, according to the Times.
Khan was declared a terrorist by the State Department previous year, dubbing him the IS head of the “Khorasan province”. In May, a US drone killed Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a strike in Pakistan.
Some Afghan Taliban members have defected to the group, with insurgents apparently adopting the black ISIL flag to rebrand themselves as a more lethal force. Last month, IS also claimed an attack on a Shi’ite Hazara rally in Kabul which killed 80 people.
The strike was carried out on July 26 while United States and Afghan special operations forces carried out counter-ISIL operations in Achin district in southern Nangarhar province, Pentagon spokesman Gordon Trowbridge said. Pentagon spokesperson Trowbridge later confirmed the news, but corrected that the target was taken down in the Achin district, instead of Kot.
In July 2015, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency erroneously claimed that Khan had been killed in a US-led coalition strike in coordination with information they provided.
Taliban and al Qaeda are bitter rivals of the Islamic State.
In Afghanistan, Taliban and Islamic State fighters have battled over territory in Nangarhar, though both have recently been more busy defending against US and Afghan assaults.
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“They got him”, a US defense authority who remained anonymous said ahead of the official statement, according to GEO TV. The Taliban reject al-Baghdadi as leader of an envisioned worldwide caliphate. In January, the U.S. President Barrack Obama granted the U.S. military authority to carry out airstrikes against the so-called Islamic State in Afghanistan.
