The U.S. has said that its forces have killed Abu Sayed, the leader of ISIS-Khorasan, the terror group’s affiliate in Afghanistan.
The news comes days after ISIS admitted its 45-year-old leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in an air strike in the Iraqi province of Nineveh.
Sayed was killed “in a strike on the group’s headquarters in Kunar Province on July 11.
Defense Secretary James Mattis told reporters on Friday that Sayed’s death was a “victory on the [American] side in terms of setting them [ISIS] back.”
“Significance is, you kill a leader of one of these groups and it sets them back for a day, a week, a month, depending on who it is, what kind of people are below them…[This] is the right direction,” Mattis said.
ISIS chose Abu Sayed to lead the group as its “third emir” after U.S. and Afghan forces killed previous two emirs, Hafiz Sayed Khan in late July 2016 and Abdul Hasib in late April.