U.S. Special Forces soldier killed in Afghanistan

A U.S. Army Special Forces soldier was killed in eastern Afghanistan during a joint operation with Afghan forces against affiliates of the Islamic State extremist group, the Pentagon said on Twitter late Saturday.

“The soldier was mortally wounded late Saturday during an operation in Nangarhar province,” Capt. Bill Salvin, a spokesman for the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said.

The death was the first U.S. casualty in Afghanistan from hostile fire since the beginning of the year, according to a tally kept by the website iCasualties. Last year, 13 U.S. soldiers died in the country, 10 of them because of enemy fire.

In total, 2,217 U.S. soldiers have died in Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001. Another 20,000 have been wounded, according to the Pentagon.

About 8,400 U.S. soldiers remain in Afghanistan, carrying out two missions — one under NATO’s mission to train and assist Afghan forces, and a second counterterrorism mission focused on al-Qaida and affiliates of the Islamic State.

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson, has expressed the need for thousands more U.S. soldiers ahead of what is expected to be a tough fighting season.

Saturday’s operation happened in Achin district, which has remained the hotbed of an Islamic State affiliate even as operations by Afghan and American forces have struck heavy blows to the group in neighboring areas.

Jawid Salim, a spokesman for the Afghan commando forces, said the U.S. soldier was accompanying Afghan special forces in an operation in Shadal Bazaar and he was mortally wounded by a roadside bomb.

“The soldier was on foot,” Salim said.

Malik Kamin, a tribal elder in Shadal Bazaar, said the area had been the front line of fighting, but the Islamic State-affiliated fighters had been pushed back about 6 miles during operations in the past two weeks.

“We didn’t see American soldiers in Achin and Shadal Bazaar before, but 15 days ago when the anti-IS operation started, Americans also came here and they are helping Afghan forces,” said Kamin, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “There is constant heavy fighting and airstrikes and drones.”

In a news conference in Kabul last week, Salvin said the goal of the U.S. counterterror mission in Afghanistan for 2017 is to eliminate the remaining Islamic State-affiliated pockets.

To that end, the mission has carried out an intense campaign of airstrikes against the Islamic State affiliates, as well as the remnants of al-Qaida, with about 560 strikes so far this year, more than a hundred of those since the beginning of April.

He said the Islamic State-affiliated group has lost two-thirds of its territory and about half of its fighters over the past year and is left with an estimated 600 to 800 fighters in eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar.