The head of the Islamic State (IS) group in Afghanistan — described as the mastermind behind high-profile attacks including an assault on a military hospital that claimed at least 50 lives — has been killed, US and Afghan officials said.
Abdul Hasib, whose group is affiliated with IS in Iraq and Syria, was killed last month in a targeted raid by special forces in the eastern province of Nangarhar, the presidential palace in Kabul said in a statement.
The second leader of the militant group to be killed by US and Afghan forces in less than nine months, his death came days after Washington dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb on IS hideouts in the same area.
Photo: EPA
Analysts described him as “obscure,” but authorities ascribed responsibility to him for high-profile assaults in Kabul, including the savage attack on a military hospital in March when assailants stabbed bedridden patients and threw grenades into crowded wards.
“He had ordered the attack” on the hospital, the presidential statement said, adding that Kabul will fight IS and other extremist groups “until they are annihilated.”
NATO commander in Afghanistan General John Nicholson confirmed the killing of Hasib and said that “any ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] member that comes to Afghanistan will meet the same fate.”
“This is the second ISIS-K emir we have killed in nine months, along with dozens of their leaders and hundreds of their fighters,” he added, using the acronym for the group’s local affiliate, Islamic State Khorasan Province.
The first, Hafiz Saeed, was killed in a US airstrike in Nangarhar Province in July last year. Like Hasib, his death was seen as a setback, but not a mortal blow to the group.
“The death of Abdul Hasib does not make a difference for the Daesh group in Afghanistan,” Kabul-based writer and analyst Ahmad Saeedi said, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.
They will simply put another leader in place, he said.
“Dozens of Daesh fighters have been killed in eastern Afghanistan, but it did not bring positive change,” he said.
First emerging in Afghanistan in 2015, the group overran large parts of Nangarhar and Kunar provinces, near the Pakistan border.
Their part in the Afghan conflict had been largely overshadowed by the much stronger Taliban. However, their profile grew as they claimed responsibility for a series of bloody attacks, notably in Kabul, including the audacious hospital assault in March.
The US Forces-Afghanistan said that defections and recent battlefield losses have reduced the local IS presence from a peak of as many as 3,000 fighters to 800 at most.
There has still been no official word from NATO forces on the toll from the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, dubbed the “Mother of All Bombs,” dropped in Nangarhar last month.
The blast killed at least 95 militants, according to the Afghan Ministry of Defense, but NATO officials have said they are still assessing the damage. Journalists have been prevented from reaching the blast site.
With roughly one-third of the country outside government control, Afghan security forces have faced soaring casualties as they struggle to contain the resurgent militant group.
The Pentagon is to ask the White House next week to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan to break the deadlocked fight against the Taliban, a senior official said on Thursday.
US media said it will seek 3,000 to 5,000 more soldiers, mainly to advise and train Afghan military and police.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema