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Pentagon: Head of ISIS in Afghanistan Killed in Strike | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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US Department of Defense (Reuters)


Washington, Kandahar- The head of ISIS in Afghanistan, Abu Sayed, was killed in a strike on the group’s headquarters in Kunar province earlier this week, the Pentagon said on Friday.

Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement that other members of the terrorist group were also killed in the strike on Tuesday.

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters, “The significance is you kill a leader of one of these groups and it sets them back … it is obviously a victory on our side in terms of setting them back, it is the right direction.”

Sayed is the third ISIS leader in Afghanistan to be killed since July 2016.

Former leader Abdul Hasib was killed in a joint US and Afghan operation on April 27 in the eastern province of Nangarhar. Hasib’s predecessor Hafiz Saeed Khan died in a US drone strike in 2016.

General John Nicholson, the top US commander in Afghanistan, has vowed to defeat ISIS there this year.

Also Friday, doctors said that at least eight Afghan civilians including women and children were wounded in an air strike in a restive southern province.

The strike occurred late Thursday in volatile Sajawal Kala near Tarin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan, a poppy-growing province where the Taliban have a heavy presence.

“At least eight people, all civilians, were wounded” in the strike and brought to a government hospital in Tarin Kot, said Zia-ul-Rahman, a doctor in the hospital.

“Among the victims were five women, two children and a young man,” he told AFP.