Afghan Intelligence Agency has reported that a third top Islamic State Commander was killed in a US drone strike in the east region of the country.
The strike killed Shahidullah Shahid and more than two dozen militants in Eastern Afghanistan, south of the city Jalalabad. The drone struck the day Taliban officials met for the first time with an Afghanistan delegation in Islamabad, Pakistan, to open peace negotiations. Afghan intelligence officials said, those killed in the drone strike included Shahid, a former Pakistan Taliban spokesman and another senior Islamic State leader in Afghanistan, Gul Zaman.
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, controls vast portions of Syria and western Iraq. Last year, it began recruiting disaffected members of both the Pakistan and Afghan Taliban insurgencies and providing funds to open a front in South Asia, said Seth Jones, a political scientist with RAND Corp. “What they've done is they haven't built anything from scratch. They've just reached out to disaffected folks. It's possible, for example, if negotiations continue with the Afghan Taliban, that those who don't want a peace deal may defect to the Islamic State. But the challenge the Islamic State has in this area is its ideology is foreign,” he said.
Last year, Shahid was fired as Pakistani Taliban spokesman after pledging allegiance to the Islamic State. At the time the Pakistan Taliban said Shahidullah Shahid was a “nom de guerre” and that his real name was Sheikh Maqbool.
