Hafiz Saeed Khan was killed on July 26 in the Achin district of Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province, said Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Gordon Trowbridge in a statement.
Khan, a former senior leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was appointed head of the ISIS’s branch in Afghanistan in January 2015 after pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Ariana reports.
Khan helped establish training camps in western Afghanistan for the ISIS (ISIL, IS and Daesh) and was responsible for a series of suicide attacks that killed up to 30 people in Jalalabad in April 2015, the Pentagon said.
Nangarhar has been a hotbed for ISIS presence since last summer.
“Khan’s death affects ISIL-Khorasan (ISIS-K) (the acronym for ISIS’s Afghanistan and Pakistan branch) recruiting efforts and will disrupt ISIL-K’s operations in Afghanistan and the region,” he added.
However, this is not the first time Khan has been reported dead. Afghan intelligence agents claimed he was killed in January of last year, but the report was never confirmed.
U.S. officials estimate there are some 1,000 to 1,500 ISIS fighters in Afghanistan currently, most of them are believed to be former Pakistani Taliban who shifted loyalty to ISIS in the past two years.
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