Nuristan [Afghanistan], August 1. The death toll of last week’s flooding in Afghanistan’s Kamdish district has risen to 113 with dozens still missing, TOLO News reported quoting an official, adding that 70 more were injured.

The floods happened on Wednesday due to heavy rains in the Kamdish district in Nuristan province. “Some are still missing… 12 kilometers of road has been destroyed, 173 houses were totally damaged,” the State Minister on Natural Disaster Management Ghulam Bahauddin Jailani said, TOLO News reported.

Some lawmakers from the province said the flood-affected residents need urgent assistance.

The lawmakers claimed that the Taliban is obstructing the rescue operations of the victims. But the Taliban has said that it has prevented the infiltration of the government forces to flood-hit areas.

“The people are in a critical situation. They need urgent help. They have lost everything,” said Ismail Atikan, an MP from Nuristan.

Nuristan governor Hafiz Abdul Qayum said some of the affected families have been provided support by the government.

“Our teams that have been sent. Based on their assessment, the flood-affected people need tents, beds and kitchen kits as their basic needs,” he said.

Last month, at least 12 people were also killed as heavy rains and flash floods hit parts of Afghanistan’s western province of Herat.

The floods also destroyed tens of residential houses and orchards in the districts and caused the closure of several district roads to traffic. RSS

Kandahar [Afghanistan], August 1. Several rockets struck Afghanistan’s Kandahar airport overnight, RT reported.

No casualties have been reported so far. Violence has escalated in Afghanistan in recent weeks as the Taliban have intensified their offensive against civilians, Afghan defense and security forces.

This comes in wake of foreign troop’s drawdown from the war-torn country.

Last month, three rockets landed in areas near the Presidential Palace during Eid prayers.

Over the last few weeks, the Taliban captured several districts in Afghanistan including Takhar, the country’s northeastern province.

The Taliban seized over 193 district centres and 19 border districts, according to the Afghan foreign ministry.’

The Taliban have also taken control of 10 border crossing points across the country in Takhar, Kunduz, Badakhshan, Herat, and Farah provinces leading to the complete shutdown of cross-border movements and trade in these areas.

The ministry further disclosed that since April 14, nearly 4,000 ANDSF personnel had been killed, over 7,000 injured, and about 1,600 captured by the Taliban. As many as 2,000 civilians, including women and children, were killed in the violence, while 2,200 were injured. RSS/Photo Source: Agency

ISLAMABAD, Sept 16: Thousands of Shiite Muslims from Afghanistan and Pakistan are being recruited by Iran to fight with President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria, lured by promises of housing, a monthly salary of up to $600 and the possibility of employment in Iran when they return, say counterterrorism officials and analysts.

These fighters, who have received public praise from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, even have their own brigades, but counterterrorism officials in both countries worry about the mayhem they might cause when they return home to countries already wrestling with a major militant problem.

Amir Toumaj, Iran research analyst at the U.S.-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said the number of fighters is fluid but as many as 6,000 Afghans are fighting for Assad, while the number of Pakistanis, who fight under the banner of the Zainabayoun Brigade, is in the hundreds.

In Afghanistan, stepped-up attacks on minority Shiites claimed by the upstart Islamic State group affiliate known as Islamic State in the Khorasan Province could be payback against Afghan Shiites in Syria fighting under the banner of the Fatimayoun Brigade, Toumaj said. Khorasan is an ancient name for an area that included parts of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.

“People were expecting blowback,” said Toumaj. IS “itself has its own strategy to inflame sectarian strife.”

Shiites in Afghanistan are frightened. Worshippers at a recent Friday prayer service said Shiite mosques in the Afghan capital, including the largest, Ibrahim Khalil mosque, were barely a third full. Previously on Fridays — the Islamic holy day — the faithful were so many that the overflow often spilled out on the street outside the mosque.

Mohammed Naim, a Shiite restaurant owner in Kabul issued a plea to Iran: “Please don’t send the poor Afghan Shia refugees to fight in Syria because then Daesh attacks directly on Shias,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

Pakistan has also been targeted by the Islamic State in Khorasan province. IS has claimed several brutal attacks on the country’s Shiite community, sending suicide bombers to shrines they frequent, killing scores of devotees.

In Pakistan, sectarian rivalries routinely erupt in violence. The usual targets are the country’s minority Shiites, making them willing recruits, said Toumaj. The most fertile recruitment ground for Iran has been Parachinar, the regional capital of the Khurram tribal region, that borders Afghanistan, he said. There, Shiites have been targeted by suicide bombings carried out by Sunni militants, who revile Shiites as heretics.

In June, two suicide bombings in rapid succession killed nearly 70 people prompting nationwide demonstrations, with protesters carrying banners shouting: “Stop the genocide of Shiites.”

A Pakistani intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said recruits are also coming from northern Gilgit and Baltistan. Recruiters are often Shiite clerics with ties to Iran, some of whom have studied in seminaries in Iran’s Qom and Mashhad cities, said a second Pakistani official, who also spoke on condition he not be identified because he still operates in the area and exposing his identity would endanger him.

Yet fighters sign up for many reasons.

Some are inspired to go to Syria to protect sites considered holy to Shiite Muslims, like the shrine honoring Sayyida Zainab, the granddaughter of Islam’s Prophet Muhammed. Located in the Syrian capital of Damascus, the shrine was attacked by Syrian rebels in 2013. Others sign up for the monthly stipend and the promise of a house. For those recruited from among the more than 1 million Afghan refugees still living in Iran it’s often the promise of permanent residence in Iran. For Shiites in Pakistan’s Parachinar it is outrage at the relentless attacks by Sunni militants that drives them to sign up for battle in Syria, said Toumaj.

Mir Hussain Naseri, a member of Afghanistan’s Shiite clerics’ council, said Shiites are obligated to protect religious shrines in both Iraq and Syria.

“Afghans are going to Syria to protect the holy places against attacks by Daesh,” he said. “Daesh is the enemy of Shias.”

Ehsan Ghani, chief of Pakistan’s Counterterrorism Authority, told The Associated Press that his organization is sifting through hundreds of documents, including immigration files, to put a figure on the numbers of Pakistanis fighting on both sides of the many Middle East conflicts, including Syria. But it’s a cumbersome process.

“We know people are going from here to fight but we have to know who is going as a pilgrim (to shrines in Syria and Iraq) and who is going to join the fight,” he said.

Pakistan’s many intelligence agencies as well as the provincial governments are involved in the search, said Ghani, explaining that Pakistan wants numbers in order to devise a policy to deal with them when they return home. Until now, Pakistan has denied the presence of the Islamic State group in Pakistan.

Nadir Ali, a senior policy analyst at the U.S.-based RAND Corp., said Afghan and Pakistani recruits also provide Iran with future armies that Tehran can employ to enhance its influence in the region and as protection against perceived enemies.

Despite allegations that Iran is aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ali says battle-hardened Shiite fighters are Tehran’s weapon should relations with an Afghan government that includes the radical majority Sunni religious movement deteriorate.

“Once the Syrian civil war dies down Iran is going to have thousands, if not tens of thousands of militia, under its control to use in other conflicts,” he said. “There is a potential of Iran getting more involved in Afghanistan using militia because Iran is going to be really concerned about security on its border and it would make sense to use a proxy force.”

Pakistan too has an uneasy relationship with Iran. On occasion the anti-Iranian Jandullah militant group has launched attacks against Iranian border guards from Baluchistan province. In June, Pakistan shot down an Iranian drone deep inside its territory.

In Pakistan the worry is that returning fighters, including those who had fought on the side of IS, could start another round of sectarian bloodletting, said the intelligence official. AP

TACTICAL BASE GAMBERI, Aug 22: Deep in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, on the front lines against Taliban and Islamic State fighters, U.S. military commanders say they need more forces to better train Afghan soldiers to combat the escalating threat. President Donald Trump declared Monday he’d augment troop levels, but wouldn’t say by how much.

At Tactical Base Gamberi, the Americans helping Afghan army units try to quell the insurgent stronghold of Nangarhar province want to put more advisory teams into the field. They believe expanding the training can make the Afghans more capable of taking on the enemy alone.

“We need guardian angels,” said Lt. Col. John Sandor, deputy senior adviser for the Afghan Army’s 201st Corps, referring to security forces that would protect U.S. training teams so they can work alongside Afghan brigades.

Senior military officials have been discussing such deficiencies for months. In February, the top U.S. commander in the country told Congress he needs “a few thousand” more troops. The Pentagon has asked for Trump’s approval of a nearly 4,000 troop increase as part of the broader new strategy.

Trump already had given military leaders greater authority to manage America’s military efforts. But his new Afghan strategy had been held up for months amid a contentious review process that has included the president publicly voicing his dissatisfaction with the options.

He finally outlined his plan in a primetime television address Monday, signaling more U.S. and NATO forces were coming, but no indication of the scale or how long they’d be deployed.

“We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities,” Trump said. “Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on. America’s enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out.”

Thousands of miles away, in a sparse, wood-paneled room at the Gamberi training base, Sandor and others outlined the training restrictions they currently face. In two nearby provinces, for example, Afghan units were conducting training without American advisers to oversee the instruction and make sure they are learning the best combat tactics.

But in other cases, the lack of American support means Afghan units are reluctant to go out on their own.

Sometimes, said Maj. Richard Anderson, operations adviser for 201st Corps, the Afghan answer is: “Let the Americans do it.”

In early spring, when U.S. forces asked the Afghan army to step up its pursuit of IS militants in Nangarhar province, they encountered resistance.

Demoralized by an IS attack that killed 16 Afghan soldiers in April, Afghan commanders wanted the American and Afghan special operations forces to carry the fight. But ground units are needed to hold territory, so U.S. advisers were forced to spend weeks cajoling the Afghan Army to join the battle.

Ultimately, they did. But U.S. military officials say such episodes underscore the need for more advisers, and as a result, more troops to protect them as they move into places like Nangarhar, an IS stronghold and notoriously difficult fighting arena. The province is home to Tora Bora, a network of caves where Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida militants eluded capture and survived a massive American bombing campaign early in the war.

Without the enhanced training that additional forces would make possible, Sandor said, “it’s hard to turn the corner and make them better.”

The advisers, however, also point to progress.

In January, Afghan forces trying to resupply troops to the north would only go out with U.S. aircraft and escorts. A month later, with training and encouragement, the Afghans were using their own gunships and artillery support on the supply runs, with no U.S. assistance.

“We took them from ‘we can help, but if we do it, you’ll never figure it out,’” said Maj. Richard Anderson, operations adviser for 201st corps. “At times it seems like a drag is there, but once you get them to the point … they can do it.”

The top Afghan commander at Gamberi credits the advisers with increasing his corps’ readiness.

“I want to have enough equipment and advisers to keep my troops equipped, and help against the enemy,” said Lt. Gen. Mohammad Zaman Waziri, 201st Corps commander. More advisors, he added, could help the corps get light and heavy weapons and the training needed to use them, “because the enemy has a lot of capability and has not weakened as much as we would want them to.”

Like many Afghan commanders, Waziri would like even more. He recalls the time before the Obama administration scaled back operations, when U.S. troops fought with Afghans and provided far more air support. He’d like such support again.

Waziri said his troops were thrilled when the U.S. dropped the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, or MOAB, on IS insurgents in Nangarhar province in April. It was the first time the largest non-nuclear bomb was ever dropped in combat, and Afghans estimated nearly 100 killed.

“If there is any bigger bomb than MOAB they should drop that, too,” he said. –AP

KABUL, July 15: Last year, Afghanistan’s version of “Sesame Street” introduced a little girl character aimed at inspiring girls in the deeply conservative Muslim nation. Now a new muppet is joining the cast: her brother, who will show boys the importance of respecting women.

Zeerak, whose name means “Smart” in Afghanistan’s two official languages, is a 4-year-old boy who enjoys studying and learning. He joins 6-year-old sister Zari, whose name means “Shimmering,” on Afghanistan’s version of the show, “Baghch-e-SimSim,” or “Sesame Garden.”

Both muppets wear traditional Afghan clothing — the baggy trousers and long embroidered shirt known as a shalwar kameez for him and colorful native dresses and a cream-colored hijab, or headscarf, for her. They join the rest of “Sesame Street’s” multi-cultural line-up, which includes muppets specially created for local versions of the program in Bangladesh, Egypt and India.

Massood Sanjer, the head of TOLO TV, which broadcasts the program in Afghanistan, said that after the overwhelmingly positive response to Zari from both parents and children, the goal was to create a boy character to emphasize the importance of gender equality and education in a country where the vast majority of girls don’t go to school and the literacy rate for women is among the lowest in the world.

“In a male-dominant country like Afghanistan, I think you have to do some lessons for the males to respect the females. So by bringing a male character to the show who respects a female character, you teach the Afghan men that you have to respect your sister the same way as you do your brother,” Sanjer said.

In keeping with that goal, Zeerak proclaimed in a recent episode of the program, “I love Zari so much and as much as I love Zari, I love her friends too.”

It’s an important message broadcast on a medium with a nationwide reach: While television in Afghanistan is largely restricted to urban areas, “Sesame Street” is also broadcast on radio in both official languages, Pashtun and Dari, expanding its audience to most of the country.

Both Zari and Zeerak were created in New York and their costumes incorporate fabrics and designs from all of Afghanistan’s major ethnic groups to promote inclusiveness in a society racked by decades of conflict.

Afghanistan has been at war for almost 40 years, since the 1979 Soviet invasion and the subsequent mujahedeen war that lasted a decade. That was followed by a devastating civil war in which warlords drew lines based on ethnicity and killed tens of thousands of people in Kabul alone.

The Taliban took over in 1996, and their five-year rule was one of brutal extremism in which they banned women from work and girls from going to school, confining them to their homes. The radical Taliban regime was forced from power by the 2001 U.S. invasion that ushered in a democratic experiment and billions of dollars in international aid to help rebuild the country.

Ahmad Arubi, the producer of the local version of “Sesame Street,” said he is hopeful that the new characters will eventually have a wider audience outside of Afghanistan.

“Possibly, in the coming years other Muslim countries, which are running this program, might use our characters, such as Zeerak and Zari. They might use our scripts, translate them in their own languages and use them in their countries,” he said.-AP

LONDON, June 23: The rise of Afghanistan and Ireland in the ranks of international cricket gathered pace on Thursday when they were voted in as full ICC members, meaning they can play test matches against the world’s elite countries.

By becoming the first countries to receive test status since Bangladesh in 2000, they took the number of test-playing nations to 12.

The first tests for Afghanistan and Ireland could be against each other, as early as next year, although no firm plans were in place.

The growth of cricket in Afghanistan has been particularly astonishing, given that most members of the current team learned to play while growing up in refugee camps in bordering Pakistan. The sport is rapidly gaining a solid fan base in Afghanistan, with the national team gaining ODI status only in 2011, qualifying for its first Cricket World Cup in 2015, and recently drawing an ODI series with West Indies.

“We dared to dream that this would happen,” said Shafiq Stanikzai, chief executive of the Afghanistan Cricket Board, “and today it has become a reality.”

Ireland has enjoyed more success at the limited-overs format, appearing in the last three World Cups and beating Pakistan and England in that time.

Ireland and Afghanistan have been playing as associate members since 1993 and 2013, respectively.

“It is a reflection not just of our past achievements,” said Warren Deutrom, chief executive of Cricket Ireland, “but of our potential to grow our great game.

“Test cricket is the pinnacle.”

Deutrom said he hopes it will stop the player drain from Ireland to England’s national team. Eoin Morgan, an Irishman, is captain of England’s ODI side.

Ireland could play England in a test match in 2019.

The ICC announced the decision following a unanimous vote at a full council meeting in London.

ICC chief executive David Richardson said the countries deserved their elevated status because of “their dedication to improving performance both off and on the field resulting in the significant development and growth of cricket in their respective countries.”

The ICC said it has also unanimously agreed to a new financial model to give greater equality in the distribution of the governing body’s income.

For the cycle 2016-2023, the Board of Control for Cricket in India will receive $405 million across the eight-year cycle, the England and Wales Cricket Board will get $139 million, Zimbabwe Cricket gets $94 million, and the seven other existing full members get $128 million each.

Ireland and Afghanistan are currently receiving $20 million each in this cycle, Richardson said, but that figure could rise to $40 million following discussions at the conference on Friday.-AP

WASHINGTON, June 16: The Pentagon will send almost 4,000 additional American forces to Afghanistan, a Trump administration official said Thursday, hoping to break a stalemate in a war that has now passed to a third U.S. commander in chief. The deployment will be the largest of American manpower under Donald Trump’s young presidency.

The decision by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis could be announced as early as next week, the official said. It follows Trump’s move to give Mattis the authority to set troop levels and seeks to address assertions by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan that he doesn’t have enough forces to help Afghanistan’s army against a resurgent Taliban insurgency. The rising threat posed by Islamic State extremists, evidenced in a rash of deadly attacks in the capital city of Kabul, has only fueled calls for a stronger U.S. presence, as have several recent American combat deaths.

The bulk of the additional troops will train and advise Afghan forces, according to the administration official, who wasn’t authorized to discuss details of the decision publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. A smaller number would be assigned to counterterror operations against the Taliban and IS, the official said.

Asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, said, “No decisions have been made.”

Daulat Waziri, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s defense ministry, was reluctant to comment on specifics Friday but said the Afghan government supports the U.S. decision to send more troops.

“The United States knows we are in the fight against terrorism, ” he said. “We want to finish this war in Afghanistan with the help of the NATO alliance.”

There was no immediate report whether NATO allies would also increase their troop commitment to Afghanistan. The U.S. currently has 8,500 troops deployed in Afghanistan.

“We are the frontline in the war against international terrorism,” Waziri said.

Although Trump has delegated authority for U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan, the responsibility for America’s wars and the men and women who fight in them rests on his shoulders. Trump has inherited America’s longest conflict with no clear endpoint or a defined strategy for American success, though U.S. troop levels are far lower than they were under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. In 2009, Obama authorized a surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, bringing the total there to more than 100,000, before drawing down over the rest of his presidency.

Trump has barely spoken about Afghanistan as a candidate or president, concentrating instead on crushing the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. His predecessors both had hoped to win the war. Bush scored a quick success, helping allied militant groups oust the Taliban shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, before seeing the gains slip away as American focus shifted to the Iraq war. In refocusing attention on Afghanistan, Obama eliminated much of the country’s al-Qaida network and authorized the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, but failed to snuff out the Taliban’s rebellion.

Mattis’ deployment of more troops will be far smaller than Obama’s.

While military leaders have consistently said more forces are needed, a decision had been tied up in a lengthy, wider debate about America’s long-term military, diplomatic and economic strategy for ending the war. Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander there, has said the troops are necessary to properly train and advise the Afghan military and perform work handled at greater cost by contractors. Afghan leaders endorse the idea of more U.S. troops, having lost significant ground to the Taliban in recent months.

But despite repeated questions from Congress this week, Mattis wouldn’t reveal his thinking on a troop increase. He said that while counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan are making progress in weakening al-Qaida and IS, “their defeat will come about only by giving our men and women on the ground the support and the authorities they need to win.”

Obama set a cap a year ago of 8,400 troops in Afghanistan after slowing the pace of what he hoped would be a U.S. withdrawal.

Nevertheless, there are at least another 2,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan not included in the official count. These include forces that are technically considered temporary even if they’ve been in the warzone for months.

Trump’s decision Tuesday to give Mattis authority to set force levels in Afghanistan mirrored similar powers he handed over earlier this year for U.S. fights in Iraq and Syria. The change was made public hours after Sen. John McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Republican chairman, blasted Mattis for the administration’s failure to present an overarching strategy for Afghanistan. McCain said the U.S. is “not winning” in Afghanistan, and Mattis agreed.

The finality of the decision isn’t entirely clear. While Trump has handed over the troop level decision-making, there is nothing preventing him from taking it back.

Mattis has repeatedly stressed that increasing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan would take place within a broader, long-term strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan. In congressional testimony this week, he said the strategy will take into account regional influences, such as Pakistan’s role as a Taliban sanctuary. Regional powers Iran, India and China, which all have political stakes in the fate of Afghanistan, also must be considered.

While the new troops could raise fears of mission creep, Mattis told lawmakers this week he didn’t envision returning to the force levels of 2010-11, when Obama thought he could pressure the Taliban into peace talks. Despite heavy losses, the Taliban fought on.

“Reconciliation” remains the goal, Mattis told a House Appropriations panel Thursday, along with reducing Afghan government corruption.

“We’re not looking at a purely military strategy,” he said. “All wars come to an end. Our job is to end it as quickly as possible without losing the very mission that we’ve recognized, through several administrations, that was worth putting those young Americans on the line for.”

There have been almost 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan since 2001. Three U.S. soldiers were killed and another was wounded in eastern Afghanistan this weekend in an attack claimed by the Taliban.-AP

KABUL, May 31: At least 49 people were killed and hundreds wounded today when a massive truck bomb ripped through Kabul’s diplomatic quarter, shattering the morning rush hour and bringing carnage to the streets of the Afghan capital.

Bodies littered the scene and a towering plume of smoke rose from the area, which houses foreign embassies, after the blast blew out the windows in several missions and residences hundreds of metres away.

Witnesses described dozens of cars choking the roads as wounded survivors and panicked schoolgirls sought safety, with men and women struggling to get through security checkpoints to search for loved ones.

It was not immediately clear what the target was. But the attack underscores spiralling insecurity in Afghanistan, where a military beset by soaring casualties and desertions is struggling to beat back the insurgents. Over a third of the country is outside government control.

More than an hour after the explosion, ambulances were still taking the wounded to hospital as firefighters struggled to control blazes in several buildings.

Health ministry spokesman Waheed Majroh said at least 49 people had been killed and 320 wounded, with the figures confirmed by a second health official and the government media office.

Authorities warned the toll could yet rise. “They are still bringing bodies and wounded people to hospitals,” senior health ministry spokesman Ismael Kawoosi told AFP.

The interior ministry was calling on Kabul residents to donate blood, saying hospitals were in “dire need”.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the attack came as the resurgent Taliban step up their annual “spring offensive”.

The Islamic State group has also claimed responsibility for several recent bombings in the Afghan capital, including a powerful blast targeting an armoured NATO convoy that killed at least eight people and wounded 28 on May 3.

Najib Danish, an interior ministry spokesman, said initial findings showed it had been a truck bomb.

Manpreet Vohra, India’s envoy to Afghanistan, told the Times Now television channel the bomb went off around 100 metres from India’s embassy, one of several in the area.

“We are all safe, all our staff, all our personnel are safe. However, the blast was very large and nearby buildings including our own building have considerable damage in terms of broken glass and shattered windows and blown doors etc,” he said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted: “We strongly condemn the terrorist blast in Kabul. Our thoughts are with the families of the deceased & prayers with the injured.”

The explosion also shattered windows at the Japanese embassy. “Two Japanese embassy staffers were mildly injured, suffering cuts,” a foreign ministry official in Tokyo told AFP.

France also reported damage to its own embassy and the German one.

Pentagon chief Jim Mattis has warned of “another tough year” for both foreign troops and local forces in Afghanistan.

Afghan troops are backed by US and NATO forces, and the Pentagon has reportedly asked the White House to send thousands more troops to the country to break the deadlock in the fight against the Taliban.

US troops in Afghanistan number about 8,400 today, and there are another 5,000 from NATO allies. They mainly serve in an advisory capacity — a far cry from the US presence of more than 100,000 six years ago.

The blast was the latest in a long line of attacks in Kabul. The province surrounding the capital had the highest number of casualties in the first three months of 2017 due to multiple attacks in the city, with civilians bearing the brunt of the violence. -AFP

WASHINGTON, May 2: After dropping a monster bomb on its fighters, then targeting its leader, the US military is looking to destroy the Islamic State group’s Afghan branch before battle-hardened reinforcements arrive from Syria and Iraq.

While US and Kabul government forces have mainly been combatting Taliban fighters since 2001, IS’s local offshoot — also known as Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K — has a stronghold in eastern Afghanistan.

First emerging in 2015, ISIS-K overran large parts of Nangarhar and Kunar provinces, near the Pakistan border, but their part in the Afghan conflict had been largely overshadowed by the operations against the Taliban.

Many Americans first heard of ISIS-K last month when the US dropped the “Mother Of All Bombs” on its Nangarhar bastion — an aerial munition that the Pentagon said was the biggest non-nuclear weapon it had ever used in combat.

US and Afghan forces then raided a compound last week close to the site of the bombing, with the Pentagon saying it believed it had killed ISIS-K’s leader Abdul Hasib during the operation.

Captain Bill Salvin, spokesman for US Forces-Afghanistan, said the local IS presence peaked at between 2,500 to 3,000 but that defections and recent battlefield losses had reduced their number to a maximum of 800.

“We have a very good chance of destroying them in 2017, making it very clear that when the ISIS fighters are destroyed elsewhere around the globe that this is not the place for you to come to plot your attacks,” Salvin told AFP.

US-backed fighters also appear to have IS on the ropes in Syria and Iraq, where an operation to wrest back control of the major northern city of Mosul has been ongoing since October.

But both the military and analysts acknowledge there is a danger of IS fighters heading to Afghanistan if they are forced out of Iraq and Syria.

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, said that while IS should ultimately be defeated in Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s timeline may be overly optimistic.

A definitive victory could take “a long time due, partly (due) to the proximity of Pakistan as well as the possible flow of fighters” from the Middle East as the “group loses sanctuaries there,” O’Hanlon told AFP.

The Taliban, which first emerged in the mid-1990s in southern Afghanistan, managed to conquer most of the country before its 2001 ouster with the help of a range of foreign jihadists, including Pakistanis, Saudis and Chechens.

Analysts say that as well as Afghans, ISIS-K includes disaffected Pakistani and Uzbek Islamists among its ranks who used to fight for the Taliban.

It first emerged as a significant player in Afghanistan in early 2015 when its fighters overran the Taliban in parts of the east and has subsequently claimed responsibility for a string of bomb attacks.

ISIS-K’s defeat would be an important victory for the US, which has struggled to boast of clear wins after forcing the Taliban out of Kabul in 2001 in the initial aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of the Long War Journal, said ISIS-K had “withstood multiple US-backed offensives over the past two years.”

But while their defeat would be a boost to the US, Roggio said the Taliban and their long-time Al-Qaeda allies were still a much bigger challenge.

“It’s not that they don’t pose a threat, but I would argue that the Taliban pose a far greater threat to the stability of Afghanistan,” Roggio told AFP.

“It would be basically winning a battle, but we are still losing the war, which is basically the story of Afghanistan since we’ve been involved there.”

America has about 8,400 troops in Afghanistan. Most belong to a NATO mission to train and advise Afghan partner forces fighting the Taliban.AFP