Islamic State leader killed in Afghan raid

Militant oversaw attacks including hospital massacre.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — The leader of the Islamic State group affiliate in Afghanistan who orchestrated audacious attacks that further upended the country’s deteriorating security situation was killed in a special operations forces raid in April, the president of Afghanistan said in a statement on Sunday.

The militant leader, Abdul Hasib, had overseen a number of bloody attacks that directly challenged the authority of President Ashraf Ghani, including a massacre at the main Afghan army hospital in Kabul that killed at least 50 people.

Hasib was killed in an operation April 27 in eastern Nangarhar province, along the border with Pakistan, according to the statement by Ghani’s office. The statement said the government had waited for verification that Hasib had been killed in the raid before announcing his death. It did not say how his death had been confirmed.

The U.S. military command in Afghanistan said in a statement Sunday that U.S. forces had participated in the raid that killed Hasib and up to 35 other militants.

It was the second time in nine months that the leader of the Islamic State in the Khorasan, as the Afghanistan affiliate is known, was killed, Gen. John W. Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in the country, said in the statement. Hasib’s predecessor, Hafiz Saeed Khan, was killed in July in a U.S. airstrike; he had been reported dead a few times before the U.S. military confirmed it in August.

The U.S. military command in Afghanistan had said that an operation on April 27 had targeted Hasib. Two U.S. Army Rangers, Sgt. Joshua Rodgers and Sgt. Cameron Thomas, were killed in the operation, perhaps by friendly fire, the Pentagon has said.

Afghan and U.S. forces often go on joint missions. The one that killed Hasib included about 50 U.S. Army Rangers and a similar number of Afghan special security forces, the Pentagon has said. A firefight broke out during the raid, which lasted more than three hours, and U.S. F-16 fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters carried out airstrikes to protect the troops.

The Islamic State in the Khorasan, which uses an ancient name for the region that includes Afghanistan and Pakistan, expanded rapidly in the eastern part of Afghanistan, where government forces and an intense air campaign by the U.S. military have tried to rout the militants. They have been reduced to about 700 fighters, down from as many as 3,000, U.S. officials said.

Last month, the United States dropped its largest conventional bomb, the 22,000-pound MOAB, on one of the group’s redoubts in Nangarhar, killing as many as 96 fighters, Afghan officials said.

Commanders decided on a ground assault, instead of another airstrike, to kill or capture Hasib because women and children were living in his compound, said a U.S. military official who asked not to be identified when providing operational details, adding that none of them had been hurt in the raid.

Even as the militants’ numbers were reduced near the eastern border with Pakistan, they claimed daring attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital. The group’s deadliest attack was a suicide bombing at a peaceful demonstration in the city last July, which killed at least 80 people.

Little is known about Hasib, a former Afghan Taliban commander who switched his loyalty to the Islamic State and took over the Afghanistan affiliate when Khan was killed. But the Afghan president’s office said he was behind the March hospital attack.

Two U.S. Army Rangers, Sgt. Joshua Rodgers and Sgt. Cameron Thomas, were killed in the operation.