During the past 24 hour, Afghan National Defense and Security Forces conducted joined offensive operations in order to protect lives and properties of people also defeating the insurgents in different parts of the country that as a result, 57 insurgents were killed and 35 others were wounded.

This joined operation of the Defense Security Forces was held by supporting of the artillery and air forces in Nangarhar , Kapisa , Paktia , Ghazni , Logar , Khost , Zabul , Kandahar , Oruzgan , Badghis , Baghlan , Faryab and Helmand provinces.

During these operations, in Jane-Khel district of Paktia , 25 insurgents were killed and 15 others were wounded , in Gomal district of Paktika , 14 members of Haqani network were killed and some round of weapon and ammunition destroyed , in Daimerdad and Sayed Abad district of Maidan Wardak , 5 insurgents were killed and 6 others were wounded.

Similarly , in Geelan district of Ghanzi , 7 insurgents were killed , 3 wounded ,  a barrel of 100 KG mine and 6  rounds of mines discovered and defused , in Muhammad Agha district of Logar , 3 insurgents were killed and 7 were wounded , in Shah wali Koot district of Kandahar , 2 insurgents were killed and 4 were wounded , in Capital of Oruzgan province , 1 insurgent was killed.

In past 24 hours, 21 planed clearing operations, 23 special operations and 2 night raids carried out in 15 provinces, also, Air forces conducted 89 aerial operations supporting Afghan National army including 11 strikes on enemy’s sanctuaries.

Afghan National Army as nation’s defense forces, are ready to give sacrifice to bring peace and security for people and has strong determination to eliminate terror groups.

A roadside bomb killed eight soldiers in a remote district in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan, a government official said on Tuesday, the second attack within days in the troubled region, like reported by jpost.com.

The blast in Harnai district was some 160 km (100 miles) east of the provincial capital, Quetta, where a suicide bomber rammed his motorcycle into an army truck on Saturday, killing eight soldiers and seven civilians.

The separatist Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) group claimed responsibility for the bombing in phone calls made to media in Quetta. Islamic State said it carried out Saturday’s bombing.

Army chief General Qamar Bajwa said the attack was an attempt to mar celebrations on Monday as Pakistan celebrated 70 years since independence from British colonial rule.

“Our resolve won’t succumb to any challenge,” Bajwa said in a statement the army media wing posted on Twitter.

Separatist militants in Baluchistan have waged a campaign against the central government for decades, demanding a greater share of resources in the gas-rich province, which is a key part of a $57 billion Chinese economic corridor through Pakistan.

The province, which shares border with Afghanistan and Iran, was rocked by a series of attacks late last year that raised concerns about a growing militant presence, including fighters affiliated with Islamic State.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-Khorasan (ISIS-K) Emir Abdul Rahman, has been killed in an airstrike in Kunar province, NATO’s Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan confirmed in a statement on Sunday, like reported by ariananews.af .

“The death of Abdul Rahman deals yet another blow to the senior leadership of ISIS-K,” said General John Nicholson, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

NATO statement said Abdul Rahman was killed in an airstrike on August 10 with three additional senior Daesh members in Darah-e-Pech district of Kunar.

“He found out just like those before him that there are no safe havens in Afghanistan.  We will hunt them down until they are no longer a threat to the Afghan people and the region,” according to the statement.

It said Rahman, in addition to being a provincial emir, was a primary candidate to become the Daesh emir following the death of Abu Sayed in July.

The statement further added, “The US and Afghan Forces continue to keep pressure on Daesh and disrupt their expansion plans as part of ongoing operations to defeat them in Afghanistan in 2017.”

At least thirty Taliban insurgents were killed after suicide attack vests exploded prematurely among the gathering of Taliban militants in western Farah province of Afghanistan, like reported by khaama.com .

According to the local government officials, the incident took place on Thursday in the restive Bala Bolok district.

Provincial governor’s spokesman Nasir Mehri confirmed the incident and said the Taliban insurgents were killed after two suicide bombings vests went off prematurely.

He said a number of the senior Taliban commanders were also among those killed.

According to Mehri, several Taliban insurgents had gathered in a meeting in a village to discuss plans for a coordinated attack on the security posts when the incident took place.

In the meantime, the Taliban insurgents denied the reports and said no such incident has taken place to claim the lives of scores of Taliban insurgents.

This comes as the Taliban-led insurgency has been rampant during the recent months as pressures on the rise in the battleground and on international level to restrict the group’s activities and freedom of action they have in their sanctuaries in the region.

The Pentagon is sending up to 100 more Marines to Afghanistan to help shore up internal security for the current contingent of troops already there, like reported by businessinsider.com.au.

“Dozens” of Marines assigned to Central Command’s special purpose task force will join roughly 300 Marines currently at Camp Shorab in Helmand Province. The deployment of additional Marines came following a request from Brig. Gen. Roger Turner, according to NBC News.

The Pentagon told Marine Times the number of Marines headed to the region will number less than 100.

The Marines are likely to come from 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, a 29 Palms, California-based infantry unit currently serving as the ground combat element for the task force.

There are less than 10,000 NATO troops currently in Afghanistan, though the Trump administration has considered sending additional troops as part of a strategy change. The most recent assessment from the Institute for the Study of War, released in February 2016, shows the situation has been deteriorating, especially since troop levels were lowered significantly after 2011.

Of about 400 districts in Afghanistan, the Taliban controls, contests, or influences 171,according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

Police investigators, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Usman’s confession helped them identify several key terrorists, like reported by asianage.com

The confession of a Pakistani teenager who was captured moments before carrying out a suicide attack has given police a rare glimpse into a terrorist network they say is behind the recent surge in sectarian violence.

Usman’s testimony, a copy of which has been seen by Reuters, describes a web of radical seminaries and training and bomb making facilities stretching from eastern Afghanistan, where the young man was recruited, to Pakistan’s southern Sindh province.

Hundreds of people have been killed in attacks on Pakistan’s small Shi’ite community, heightening fears in the Sunni-dominated country of an escalation in sectarian bloodshed that has been a persistent threat for decades.

Pakistani police believe the network, which Usman says aided him on his 2,000 km journey, has also helped ISIS spread its extremist agenda in South Asia, even without proven operational links with its core in the Middle East.

The Pakistani network brings together several known terrorists belonging to extremist groups that have targeted religious minorities for decades, police said, providing fertile ground for ISIS’s ideology to spread.

Usman’s confession does not name ISIS directly, but police say they believe the network that recruited and trained him was behind five deadly sectarian bombings in Pakistan, four of which have been claimed by the group based in Syria and Iraq.

“ISIS has no formal structure (in Pakistan). It works on a franchise system and that is the model that is being used in Pakistan,” senior Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) officer Raja Umer Khattab told Reuters.

By that he said he meant ISIS could claim attacks as its own, even if it had no direct role in coordinating them.

Usman, 18 at the time of the thwarted attack, is currently on death row in the town of Shikarpur, where he was caught.

Reuters was unable to contact him for this story, but Usman’s court-appointed lawyer said the family had shown no interest in the case.

“I am not sure if an appeal has been filed against the sentence, since no one from his family ever turned up to even meet Usman,” advocate Deedar Brohi told Reuters, adding that his client had been sentenced by an anti-terrorism court in March.

Police say the network emerged relatively recently – the main suspects became known to police over the last two years – but it is not clear whether it is acting alone or on the orders of other groups like ISIS.

Under interrogation, Usman, arrested last September, described his recruitment in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, where U.S. and Afghan forces have been fighting a local offshoot of ISIS estimated to number a few hundred fighters.

Originally from the Pakistani valley of Swat, his family fled to Nangarhar after his father, a member of the Pakistani Taliban, was killed in a drone strike.

Usman told investigators he came home one day to find his brother sitting with an older man.

“My brother said that you should join jihad … you should become a suicide bomber,” Usman said in the confession.

He left that day and travelled with the older man by bus to the Afghan province of Kandahar, where they crossed into Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

From there, they rode a motorcycle to the remote desert town of Wadh in southern Baluchistan, where Usman began his training and stayed at the home of a man called Maaz.

“In our room, Maaz took out explosives from a bag and prepared two suicide jackets,” Usman told investigators.

Police suspect Wadh is where several terrorist movements, including al-Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and other local banned groups, have been active.

The media wing of Pakistan’s military did not respond to requests for comment for this article, including how terrorists could use Wadh as hub.

An intelligence official, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the press, denied Wadh was part of a terrorist network.

“No training camp in Wadh or safe (haven) for militants now,” the official said in a Whatsapp message.

After about a month in Wadh, Usman said he travelled by motorcycle with an escort on dusty back roads to Shikarpur. A few days later, he was dispatched with his explosives vest to attack a prayer meeting attended by Shi’ite Muslims.

The attack failed when one worshipper spoke to Usman in the local Sindhi language, which he could not understand. A crowd gathered and grabbed him before he could reach his detonator.

Police investigators, who spoke about the case on condition of anonymity, said Usman’s confession helped them identify several key terrorists including a suicide vest maker and the man who oversees the network – a former Pakistani intelligence services asset named Shafiq Mengal.

“Our intelligence shows that he has 500-1,000 terrorists working under him and is living in the mountains,” said a senior police official.

Reuters was unable to contact Mengal or independently confirm the assertions of the police official. But his father, a prominent Baluch politician during the military regime of General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s, said his son had no links with terrorist networks.

“Shafiq has not given shelter to any terrorist outfit and their activities,” former Baluchistan chief minister Naseer Mengal told Reuters.

However, the older Mengal added that his son had been active in supporting Pakistani security forces in battling Baluch separatist groups.

“Shafiq fought against those elements who challenged the writ of State and were involved in target killings of innocent people and security forces,” he said.

An internal police profile of Mengal seen by Reuters said he attended an elite school in the eastern city of Lahore before completing his education at a madrassa.

According to the document, prepared by a Baluchistan police official, Mengal “was set up by the intelligence agencies to counter separatist Baloch militants” that fight the government in Baluchistan.

The report said that, more recently, it appeared Mengal shifted his efforts to helping terrorists.

The intelligence official said Mengal no longer had any association with the military.

The armed forces have launched several major offensives against groups including Al Qaeda and the Taliban in recent years, but they have also been accused of using terrorists as proxy fighters in Kashmir and Baluchistan – a charge they deny.

Police said another important suspect in the network was Hafeez Brohi, already on Pakistan’s wanted terrorist list. He comes from Shikarpur, and it was at Brohi’s residence that they said the teenager stayed before the failed attack.

Usman did not name Brohi directly but said a man named Umer Hafiz, who police officials say was actually Brohi, took him from Wadh to Shikarpur by motorbike.

Usman’s police case file also identifies Brohi as one of the main suspects in the failed bombing. Case files seen by Reuters on several other sectarian attacks in Shikarpur also single him out.

The town itself, some 250 km east of Wadh but several times that distance by road, is seen as an increasingly important centre of sectarian extremism, according to officials from the counter terrorism department.

Two local Shi’ite mosques were targeted by attacks in 2015.

Several new madrassas have been built in the area in recent years, and members of the Shi’ite minority suspect that they are used by Sunni hardliners to spread religious intolerance.

“The madrassas are concentrated in remote villages,” said Syed Atta Hussain Shah, the imam of the Shi’ite mosque in Shikarpur. “Preachers show up from elsewhere and stay in these madrassas and deliver hate-filled sermons.”

Police officials said they suspected Brohi was the point man for the network in southern Sindh province and was involved in the bombing at Sehwan Sharif shrine that killed 90 people – the most deadly attack in Pakistan claimed by ISIS.

Brohi has been in hiding for the last three or four years, according to CTD officials.

Usman was sentenced to death in March along with 10 terrorists in absentia, including Brohi.

The First Vice President General Abdul Rashid Dostum has warned of a human catastrophe as local officials are saying that the anti-government armed militant groups have massacred at least 40 people by capturing a key area in one of the restive district, like reported by khaama.com.

In a statement released in the aftermath of the brutal killings of the civilians in Sayad, Gen. Dostum criticized the government and security organs for remaining reckless to act despite three days have passed since the militants captured the area and killed dozens of people, including public uprising forces, local police forces, and ordinary civilians.

Gen. Dostum who is currently in Turkey said the militants could carry out further executions and will kill the trapped local residents if the government did not take immediate actions.

The provincial governor Mohammad Zahir Wahdat said Sunday that the militants have massacred at least 30 to 40 people, including women and children after they captured a key area in Sayad district.

He also warned that the provincial capital is also at the risk of collapse and will soon be captured by the militants if additional forces are not deployed.

The anti-government armed militant groups have not commented regarding the report so far.

Both the Taliban insurgents and ISIS loyalists are active in some of the restive districts of Sar-e-Pul but it is yet not clear which group has carried out the massacre of the civilians.

The story on the Islamic State for months has been how it is losing ground in the Middle East, but in Afghanistan, IS is expanding its operational reach. Though the Taliban are still the dominant jihadist group in the country, their nationalist jihadist agenda is losing ground to the Islamic State’s transnational jihadism. This comes at an inopportune time for the United States, which is trying to bring closure to the longest war in American history, like reported by geopoliticalfutures.com .

On Aug. 2, IS claimed responsibility for a shooting and suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque the previous day during evening prayers in the western Afghan city of Herat. The attack killed 33 people and left another 66 wounded. On Aug. 1, an IS operative blew himself up at the gate to the Iraqi Embassy in Kabul, enabling three other assailants to enter the compound. Afghan security forces engaged the attackers for several hours before finally subduing them.

Divide and Conquer

For IS, Afghanistan is like all the other countries where it is active: It’s a launch pad for the transnational caliphate. Putting down roots in Afghanistan could enable IS to cross borders into Central Asia – and into countries ripe for the Islamic State’s message, like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

The group’s biggest obstacle in Afghanistan right now is the Taliban, but that challenge isn’t what it used to be. The Taliban have fragmented in recent years following the deaths of the movement’s founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, and his successor, Mullah Akhtar Mansour. Moreover, the Taliban are trying to find a balance between pushing ahead with their jihadist insurgency and pursuing international recognition through negotiations.

What makes the Islamic State’s growth in Afghanistan more notable is that IS, too, has lost important leaders – two successively in the past two years. In April, the U.S. dropped the world’s largest non-nuclear bomb on an IS facility in Afghanistan, killing some three-dozen major IS officials. The Islamic State runs a radio station from its territory in eastern Afghanistan that has been targeted several times by U.S. airstrikes. But like IS itself, the station has come back each time.

Even before this month’s attacks, IS was ramping up its strikes in Afghanistan, but there’s something different about the recent target set. The Islamic State has attacked Shiite targets in Afghanistan before, but there now appears to be a sustained focus on them to exploit the sectarian fault line that runs through the region. Other countries with interests in the region are taking notice, but for different reasons.

Taking Notice

For Iran, IS has gone from a nuisance to a real concern. For years, the group was spreading on Iran’s western border in Iraq. Then in early June, IS staged its first attack inside Iran, simultaneously assaulting the parliament building in Tehran and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The assailants came from Iran’s Kurdish minority, based in an area on that western border. Now, the Islamic State is gaining ground to Iran’s east, in Afghanistan.

The Islamic State’s attack on the mosque in Herat, only about 70 miles (110 kilometers) from Iran’s border, was intended in part to send a message to Iran that it is vulnerable from the east as well. Tehran got the message. It cannot afford to have IS on both its western and eastern borders. Iran is already susceptible to cross-border attacks on its eastern border; it’s just that those attacks come from jihadist forces based in southwestern Pakistan. Iran will probably react to the growing IS presence in western Afghanistan by increasing its support for Taliban elements that it has cultivated over the past decade.

In recent months, IS has also carried out attacks in the northern provinces of Afghanistan, closer to Central Asia and thus Russia’s sphere of influence. In response, Russia has aligned with the Taliban as a means of countering IS in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s own insurgency in northern Afghanistan has grown exponentially in recent years, but unlike IS, the Taliban’s nationalist focus means they have no interest in their fight spilling over into Central Asia; for them, the war starts and ends with Afghanistan.

The Endless War

The Islamic State’s progress in Afghanistan greatly complicates U.S. plans in the country. U.S. President Donald Trump and his generals reportedly do not agree on how to respond to the deteriorating situation. Retired Gen. James Mattis, the U.S. defense secretary, is leading a review of U.S. strategy in the country, but the process is taking longer than expected.

At the heart of the issue is that mainstream Afghan political factions are divided along several lines. The Taliban have been benefiting from these differences. As a result, the U.S. is stuck between a rock and a hard place. After nearly 17 years, it is obvious that staying the course is not an option. Neither is cutting its losses and withdrawing. This situation predates the rise of IS in the country.

But, ironically, the Islamic State’s emergence in Afghanistan could help the United States by giving it more potential partners in the country. Washington is already tacitly cooperating with Iran against the Islamic State in Iraq. They will probably expand this cooperation into Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been trying and failing to negotiate with the Taliban for many years. With IS on the rise, those frozen talks could warm up.

The growth of IS in Afghanistan means that the country is trapped between two types of jihadists: the Taliban, who want to re-establish their emirate within the boundaries of Afghanistan, and the Islamic State, which envisions a caliphate stretching from the Middle East to South Asia and beyond. It’s not hard to see whose side the U.S., Iran and Russia will come down on.

At least two civilians, one policeman and one Resolute Support (RS) soldier were killed when a suicide bomber targeted a convoy of foreign forces in Qarabagh district in Kabul, like reported by ariananews.af.

A local official said the explosion occurred Thursday evening near to Qarabagh district governor’s office and police headquarter.

In a statement, the Resolute Support confirms that one NATO soldier was killed and six personnel (five troops and one interpreter) were wounded when their patrol was attacked.

“The patrol was conducting a partnered mission with the Afghan National Army when a personnel-borne IED detonated,” the RS statement said.

The statement added that the RS personnel who were wounded are being treated at the U.S. military hospital at Bagram Airfield.

The Taliban group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

This is the second attack on NATO convoy in the current week. On Wednesday, a suicide bomber attacked a convoy of the international troops in Kandahar province and killed two American soldiers and wounded four others.