The Islamic State group’s leader in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hafiz Saeed, was killed last month in an air strike in Nangarhar province, the Pentagon said Friday (Saturday in Manila).
Advertisement
“We think we’ve reduced their numbers fairly significantly in the last six months”, Gen. John Nicholson, the top USA military commander in Afghanistan, told Pentagon reporters in a video briefing two weeks ago.
He was killed in the southern Nangarhar province on July 26, “a hotbed for ISIL-Khorasan activity since the summer of 2015” the Pentagon said in a statement on Friday, using an alternative acronym for the group.
If confirmed, Saeed will be the third top-tier Islamic State leader to have been killed in eastern Afghanistan since US and Afghan forces began targeting the group’s commanders last summer.
The IS leader was targeted on July 26 in Nangarhar, a southern Afghan province, where the joint special forces of the USA and Afghanistan were conducting anti-IS operations.
Khan’s death affects ISIL-Khorasan recruiting efforts and will disrupt its operations in Afghanistan and the region, he said. But claims on his death were never confirmed.
That operation was considered the most significant United States raid inside Pakistan since al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, was killed in 2011.
Whereas Pakistan acknowledges that it wields some influence with the Afghan Taliban, it denies Afghan and USA accusations that it provides support and sanctuary for the Afghan Taliban and its leaders.
Both the Pakistani Taliban and ISIL have claimed responsibility for a horrific suicide bombing on Monday at a hospital in Pakistan which killed 73 people.
The statement does not confirm reports that the airstrike was carried out by a drone.
The crew included retired Pakistani military officers and a Russian navigator, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported at the time.
White House officials in June gave administration’s tacit approval to allow US commanders in Afghanistan to conduct offensive airstrikes against the Taliban, the Islamic State and other insurgent groups and to let American troops restart joint ground operations with Afghan forces. The militants are mainly in the country’s eastern region.
Afghan authorities believed by mistake that Saeed had been killed in another strike in July 2015, when a United States drone targeted dozens of IS-linked cadres in restive Nangarhar province, close to the Pakistani border. Pentagon spokesperson Trowbridge later confirmed the news, but corrected that the target was taken down in the Achin district, instead of Kot.
Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, in fact, at one point swore allegiance to Islamic State’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2014 during a spat with the Pakistani Taliban leadership.
Advertisement
Most NATO counter-terrorism troops have left Afghanistan, with the Afghan local forces now handling security.
