IS expands its presence in Afghanistan


Associated Press

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan

The Islamic State group, which has been building a presence in Afghanistan for more than a year, has established a recruitment and training camp in a restive southern province bordering Pakistan, Afghan officials said.

Last year, hundreds of insurgents fled to Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan, where the military launched a campaign to clear militants from the lawless tribal regions in the country’s north. Among them were members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, who joined forces with local Taliban fighters to attack northern Afghan cities such as Kunduz, which was briefly overrun in September.

The Pakistani military campaign also caused about 400 families loyal to the Islamic State group to flee to Afghanistan, Afghan authorities said. The families, many of them Arabs and Chechens, settled in the southern province of Zabul, in the district of Khak-e-Afghan, a former Taliban stronghold with a history of militant violence that has made it a no-go area for Afghan security forces.

The long-term intentions of the IS loyalists in Khak-e-Afghan were initially unclear. Locals said they kept to themselves but appeared wealthy, purchasing expensive properties and never bargaining down prices in the bazaar.

Now officials say the IS operatives have established a headquarters in the district and are actively recruiting and training locals to join the group as gunmen.

“They have a lot of money. People here are very poor, and that makes them very easy targets for these foreigners,” said Atta Mohammad Haqbayan, the director of Zabul’s provincial council. He said that he asked central authorities in Kabul for help to drive the IS operatives out of the province – “but no one is listening to us.”

In late July, the Afghan military launched an offensive against IS in the east of the country, backed by U.S. forces and airstrikes.

This week, the U.S. Department of Defense confirmed that the leader of IS in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hafiz Saeed, was killed some weeks ago in an American drone strike in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

U.S. military officials have said that there are between 1,500 and 3,000 IS-linked militants in the eastern region, most of them former operatives for the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban groups.