Pakistan tight-lipped about its ISIS operatives in Afghanistan

NEW DELHI: Even as the majority of over 600 ISIS Khorasan operatives, who, along with hundreds of their family members, surrendered in Afghanistan last month, are from Pakistan, the Imran Khan government has remained tight-lipped about it.

Sources based in Kabul told IANS that Islamabad made no attempt to take back the women and children of the Pakistani ISIS operatives, who, along with others, were defeated by the US-Afghan coalition security forces in a massive counter-terror operation in Nangarhar province of eastern Afghanistan in November.

Nangarhar province was the centre of the ISIS Khorasan operations in Afghanistan. Besides Pakistani nationals, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Russians, Iranians, and Kurds were among those ISIS operatives who turned themselves into the Afghan government.

Later, Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani who visited Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province and the US declared that the ISIS Khorasan Province had been wiped out. ISIS has however refrained from issuing any statement on the defeat of the Khorasan province.

In 2015, in an expansionary move, ISIS created ‘Wilayat Khorasan’ (Khurasan Province), a historical region that includes parts of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. ISIS recruited defectors and disgruntled members from the Taliban. As a result, a turf war between the Taliban and ISIS broke out in Nangarhar province, in which ISIS was able to seize territory. On April 13, 2017, the US dropped its mother of non-nuclear bombs, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), to destroy tunnel complexes used by ISIS Khorasan Province. (IANS)

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