[AnNahar] Afghan forces have killed a holy warrior commander suspected of having links to the Islamic State...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
group in an air strike, officials said Monday.
Hafiz Waheed, a successor to Abdul Rauf Khadim who died in a U.S. drone strike last month, was killed along with nine others in the Sangin district of Helmand
...an Afghan province populated mostly by Pashtuns, adjacent to Injun country in Pak Balochistan...
province late on Sunday, according to a defense ministry statement.
"All the bully boyz were associated with Islamic State group," the statement said, adding that six others were maimed in the strike.
NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the cut of the American pants...
forces, who remain in the country in a limited training mission, were not involved in the operation, a front man said.
Zamen Ali, a senior Afghan army officer in southern Afghanistan, told Agence La Belle France Presse that Waheed took over the anti-government militia Khadim had commanded following his death on February 9.
Khadim, Waheed's uncle, was a former Taliban capo and Guantanamo detainee who allegedly changed his allegiance to IS, raising fears the jihadist group was seeking to expand its operations in Afghanistan following the end of NATO forces' 13-year combat mission at the end of 2014.
But IS has never acknowledged having representatives in Afghanistan, and a senior Taliban capo told AFP on condition of anonymity that Khadim had "not formally joined IS and IS had not recognized him".
Rasol Zazai, an army front man in Helmand province told AFP that Waheed's followers were active in several areas of Sangin district, where the military began an operation in February.
Afghan security officials have launched a major operation against bully boyz in Helmand designed to weaken the Taliban before the start of the so-called "fighting season".