The United States and Afghanistan on Monday said the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan chief Abdul Hasib had been killed in an operation they had a jointly conducted on April 27. Hasib was believed to have been behind a series of major attacks in the region, including one on a Kabul military hospital on March 8 that left more than 30 dead, Reuters reported.
Several other senior leaders of the Islamic State group were also killed in the operation, which took place in the Nangarhar Province, the same area where the US had dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb on April 13. During the joint operation, 50 US Army rangers and 40 Afghan commandos were deployed and later aided by AC-130 aircraft, F-16 fighter jets, drones and Apache helicopters, according to CNN.
The US Army said this is the second regional Islamic State chief they have killed in eight months – Hasib’s predecessor Hafiz Saeed Khan was lead dead during an operation in 2016. “This successful joint operation is another important step in our relentless campaign to defeat ISIS-K [Islamic State Khorasan, a local affiliate] in 2017,” said John Nicholson, the commander of the US forces in Afghanistan. “For more than two years, ISIS-K has waged a barbaric campaign of death, torture and violence against the Afghan people, especially those in southern Nangarhar.”
The US and Afghan forces have stepped up their activities in the area over the past few months. Defeating the Islamic State in the country has been one of the main reasons the US says its troops are still stationed there. On April 13, it dropped the non-nuclear “mother of all bombs” in Nangarhar, saying it was targeting a system to tunnels used by Islamic State fighters. It later said that no civilian casualties took place despite its massive blast radius.
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