USA officials say an American drone strike in July killed a top Islamic State group leader in Afghanistan.
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Pentagon spokesman Gordon Trowbridge confirmed Khan’s death, and said in a statement that the airstrike took place during joint operations by US and Afghan special operations forces against ISIS in the southern part of Nangarhar province.
Trowbridge said Nangarhar has been a “hotbed” for ISIL-Khorasan activity since 2015.
Mr Trowbridge says Khan’s death will “disrupt” IS operations in Afghanistan.
Reuters reports that between January and early August of this year, United States warplanes carried out nearly 140 airstrikes against IS targets in Afghanistan.
Though military officials confirmed Khan was killed in the drone strike, previous reports about the deaths of top ISIS commanders have proved wrong in the past.
The commander of American and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. John Nicholson, has said that dozens of IS commanders and hundreds of fighters have been killed since the Afghan military declared its offensive in late July.
Afghan security officials had claimed the killing of Saeed Khan but their claims later proved to be incorrect.
The death of the local leader is not a fatal blow to Islamic State’s still-limited operational capabilities in the region, but it does represent a dent to its “brand” in a region rife with options for waging jihad. Khan was a former member of the Pakistani Taliban until he swore allegiance to ISIS.
Afghan authorities believed by mistake that Saeed had been killed in another strike in July 2015, when a USA drone targeted dozens of IS-linked cadres in restive Nangarhar province, close to the Pakistani border.
The IS group has also claimed responsibility for a July 23 attack in Kabul that killed dozens of people and left hundreds maimed.
The U.S. military says the group’s nascent presence in Afghanistan has dwindled, with fighters largely confined to two or three districts in Nangarhar from around nine in January.
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White House officials in June gave administration’s tacit approval to allow USA 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. At that time, there were an estimated 3,000 IS militants in the country, a number much smaller than the 25,000 – 30,000 Taliban fighters.
