Afghanistan drone strike targeted Islamic State ‘planner’ in car, US says

In a briefing earlier on Saturday the Pentagon said two “high value targets” were killed in the strike and a third individual injured, but gave no further details. All three casualties are thought to have been travelling together in the vehicle that was hit.

“They have lost some capability to plan and conduct missions [but] nobody’s saying ‘well, we got them, we don’t have to worry about [ISKP]’ … The threat stream is still active, still dynamic,” a Pentagon spokesperson said.

The drone strike is likely to be in part aimed at reassuring a shaken US public that its government’s counter-terrorist capabilities in Afghanistan remain intact despite the chaotic withdrawal.

However, there is no indication that the targets of the drone were involved in Thursday’s blast, which killed 13 US marines and about 160 civilians, and officials downplayed the impact on ISKP.

“We have the means to carry out over the horizon counter-terror capabilities and we will defend ourselves,” the spokesperson told reporters, adding that the targets of the drone strike were “already on the US radar”.

Thursday’s bombing focused attention on ISKP, which had previously been seen as only a minor actor in Afghanistan and one of the weaker IS affiliates around the world.

The group was founded in 2014 by representatives of the central IS leadership in Iraq, who recruited a few dozen disaffected Talibancommanders and defectors from other militants from the region. By 2018 it had seized significant territory in districts close to the border with Pakistan in the eastern Nangarhar province, where the drone strike occurred around midnight on Friday. The name Khorasan was given by medieval Islamic imperial rulers to a region including modern Afghanistan.

Major offensives by government forces and the US in 2019 inflicted heavy casualties on ISKP and forced them from their strongholds in Nangarhar. Fighters from the Taliban, which viewed the ISKP as a threat to its campaign to take control of Afghanistan, also attacked the group’s enclave.

In a recent report compiled from intelligence supplied by member nations the UN said ISKP had been reduced to 1,500-2,200 fighters, though it noted that ISKP had intensified its new campaign of violence this year. In recent months, ISKP commanders have been among the biggest clients of local arms dealers around Jalalabad, suggesting that some of its networks have survived.

On Friday, a senior Taliban commander in Jalalabad said some ISKP members there had been arrested in connection with the Kabul attack.

“They are being interrogated by our intelligence team,” the commander told Reuters.

ISKP sees the Taliban as apostates, accusing Afghanistan’s new rulers of being “filthy nationalists” who have compromised their faith by negotiating with the US and other international powers.

Though the Pentagon said there had not been any civilian casualties, a community elder in Jalalabad said three people were killed and four were wounded in the US strike.

There was no confirmation of either claim.

While Kabul’s airport has been in chaos, the rest of the city has been generally calm. The Taliban have told residents to hand over government equipment including weapons and vehicles within a week, spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said.