Afghan security forces have killed 10 fighters who claimed to be from Islamic State (IS) in Afghanistan, officials said, amid reports that growing numbers of disgruntled Taliban fighters have joined the militant group that controls much of Syria and Iraq.

Defense ministry spokesman Dawlat Waziri said the militants were all associated with the Islamic State, known in Afghanistan as “Daesh”. They were killed in an operation in the southern province of Helmand on Sunday.

The government identified one of the militants as Hafiz Wahidi, the nephew and successor of Mullah Abdul Rauf, a veteran militant killed last month in a drone strike.

Officials say Rauf, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, had also defected from the Taliban and called himself the leader of the Islamic State in Helmand.

Reports of Taliban fighters switching sides to IS in recent months have raised concerns in war-weary Afghanistan, though there is little evidence of any operational ties between the fighters and the group’s leadership.

People fear the emergence of the IS group could heighten sectarian tensions in Afghanistan.

The Afghan army has been leading operations in Helmand since February to clear the restive southern province of Taliban fighters ahead of the so-called fighting season that kicks off each spring.

Fifty-eight armed Taliban members were killed by Afghan security forces across the country on Sunday, a Ministry of Interior statement said.

Fighting continued Sunday around Sirte as Islamic State militants remained in control of the coastal city’s downtown, and militia from Misrata and the Libya Dawn military alliance prepared for what they said would be a huge assault Monday.

Along the western highway in the late afternoon, a Libyan Dawn warplane circled, dropping two bombs on what was believed to be a prison occupied by Islamic State. In the morning, mortar and gunfire had battered the area.

Roads were deserted, with little sign of residents fleeing the area. One family in a car trying to enter the city Sunday evening expressed their anger at Misratan troops trying to keep them from what is a volatile area. “Our home is in a safe place in the city,” they said.

Six Misratan fighers have been killed in the fighting so far, with dozens more wounded. The bodies of 17 Islamic State militants killed Saturday were flown to Misrata on Sunday, where they were brought to a hospital morgue.

Misrata forces estimate that up to 25 Islamic State fighters have died since fighting broke out Saturday.
The fighting came one month after Islamic State posted a video showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians on a Libyan beach and appears to have ended insistence by the government in Tripoli – one of two that claim to rule this country – that Islamic State forces were really sympathizers of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

One high-ranking Misratan government official said late Sunday that Sirte’s tribal leaders have distanced themselves from Islamic State in talks with Misratans. He also said Misratan forces had killed the local Islamic State leader and an unspecified number of foreign fighters.

But Islamic State fighters still occupy the landmark Ougadougou complex, a prison and a hotel. They also control Sirte’s university, the Ibn Sina hospital and the fishing port. Misratan forces have encircled the city, thrown up four checkpoints near the power station to the west, and control the key military airport and seaport, as well as residential areas.

Misratan forces also brought in reinforcements from Misrata, 150 miles to the west, and from Sidra, Libya’s largest oil port, where Libya Dawn fighters have been battling forces aligned with Libya’s other government, which is based in Tobruk. Misratan forces appeared to be holding positions about 10 miles from Sirte on the west and south and perhaps a mile on the east.

In the early evening, Misratan troops relaxed around a campfire in a outlying field. One said the Misratans now are focused on expelling not only Islamic State but also Ansar al Shariah, the militia that the United States blames for the death of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi.

“We need to get out Ansar al Sharia and Daesh,” said Ali Alheishi, 31, whose brother was killed during the 2011 anti-Gadhafi revolution, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “I only believe in the Libyan flag, not the black flag.”

Boko Haram, which is seeking to carve an Islamist emirate out of northeastern Nigeria, has expanded its zone of operations over the past year, but attacks on Chadian territory remain rare.

“Boko Haram elements this morning attacked the village of Djargagoroum, between Ngouboua and Kaiga,” said a resident of the targeted village who asked not to be named.

“The attack was repelled. We count one dead and two houses were burned.” Boko Haram raided nearby Ngouboua, on the shores of Lake Chad, last month in the group’s first known lethal attack on Chadian soil.

Chad’s military has spearheaded an operation by Nigeria’s neighbours against the insurgency, which has killed thousands and which last week pledged its allegiance to the Islamic State militant group.

Militants loyal to the Islamic State (IS) group have attacked a checkpoint near the Libyan capital.

The explosion at the checkpoint next to a Janzour security building, west of Tripoli, reportedly wounded five policemen.

Islamic State militants published on social media a picture of a security building next to the checkpoint which they said was the location of Sunday’s bomb attack.

The explosion comes days after a similar attack on a police station in the capital.

A second explosion took place in a suburb of the western city of Misrata, a resident said.

He said the blast appeared to have been triggered by a car bomb and killed one person but no more information was immediately available.

Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city, is the power base of a faction called Libya Dawn which seized Tripoli in August, forcing the internationally recognised government to the east.

Groups of Islamist militants, who have declared loyalty to IS over the past six months, have been exploiting chaos in Libya, where two governments allied to armed factions are vying for power four years after the overthrow of dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

They claimed responsibility for an attack on the Corinthia luxury hotel in Tripoli in January, which killed five foreigners and at least four Libyans, as well as an attack on a group of Egyptian Copts in the central city of Sirte, triggering air strikes by Egypt.

The site of Sunday’s explosion is close to the Palm City compound, once a popular place of accommodation for diplomats until last year when most left due to the deteriorating security situation.

Social media has become a popular vector for Islamic jihadists to spread their message and entice recruits, as we’ve seen recently with ISIS’s use of Twitter to lure young men and women from Britain and Canada to Syria.

But an argument has raged in intelligence circles on how to counter social media’s power, whether it’s even possible or even desirable.

The co-author of a recent report by the Brookings Institution study on ISIS’s use of Twitter argues it’s not only possible but also effective.

J.M Berger, a research fellow at the Washington-based think tank, said Twitter’s recent crackdown on accounts related to ISIS and its supporters did much to degrade its ability to reach outside the group’s smaller community.

But there’s been little discussion on the topic among the companies that operate social-media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google Plus, government and others, including free-speech advocates and those working to counter violent extremism, Berger told Yahoo Canada News.

“What really needs to happen is the stakeholders in this … all need to get together in a room and really have an airing of this issue,” said Berger, whose book on ISIS is coming out this month. “I think the main obstacle to that happening right now is the social media companies.”

The research report for Brookings by Berger and Jonathon Morgan analyzed thousands of ISIS-related Twitter accounts, estimating the group and its friends had 46,000 and perhaps as many as 90,000 accounts in the main sampling period between September and late December 2014.

When it comes to social media, Berger hates the “whack-a-mole” analogy, used he says by those who think it’s fruitless to even try to root out the jihadists’ message. Berger said the position has not been backed by hard evidence.

“It’s been a battle of opinions for a long time without any data to inform it.”

His research suggests attacking ISIS’s social media presence works.

“In a very broad sense we talked about the fact that the suspensions that are currently going on are having a detrimental effect on ISIS’s ability to carry out its strategies,” Berger said.

“There’s a pretty substantial presence of ISIS supporters on Twitter and their content continues to be available, but they’ve lost the ability to broadcast that content out into a wider audience and that’s a pretty significant change.”

The data showed Twitter’s large-scale account suspensions have a substantial impact on how well ISIS’s social-media network can achieve its goals, Berger said.

“Nobody’s trying to completely remove them from the platform,” he said. “If they really wanted to, they could probably knock it down to a couple hundred accounts and keep it there but it would require resources and a commitment that they’re not interested in making for various reasons.”

The problem, he said, is they have not been forthcoming on how they apply those content rules.

The deputy head of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon has warned that ISIS could begin launching attacks against the Lebanese army as early as next month.

He further places the blame for the rise of ISIS on the West and Gulf Arab countries that continue to finance and arm the jihadist group.

Hezbollah fighters have been assisting the Lebanese army in repelling jihadist attacks into Lebanon.

Observers say jihadist attacks, especially into northern Lebanon, are in response to Hezbollah sending its fighters into Syria to assist the Syrian military against a fractured Syrian opposition whose ranks over the past two years have swelled with Sunni jihadist fighters mainly from ISIS and the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra Front.

Qassam’s warning recently was underscored in a WND report that some 3,000 Sunni jihadist fighters have gathered in the Syrian Qalamoun mountains bordering eastern Lebanon, poised to attack a series of Christian towns in northern and central Lebanon.

The concern is that the jihadists are staging not only in the north around Tripoli and in areas in the northern Bekaa Valley but also around Saida, or Sidon, south of Beirut, and in the south from the Syrian Golan Heights.

In its preemptive attacks, the Lebanese army, backed by Shiite elements of Hezbollah fighters, has been launching artillery against ISIS positions in the northern part of Lebanon.

The Lebanese army has begun to undertake preemptive strikes following offensive ISIS attacks last month around Ras Baalbek from their positions in the Syrian Qalamoun mountains just across the border.

The army was able to repel the attacks, but ISIS killed some 22 Lebanese soldiers and took police hostages on the outskirts of Arsal, which ISIS now occupies.