>
Article snippet: KHOGYANI, Afghanistan — When the American military dropped the largest bomb in its arsenal on an Islamic State cave complex here in eastern Afghanistan in April, the generals justified it as part of a robust campaign to destroy the group’s local affiliate by year’s end. Its force had been reduced to 700 fighters from 3,000, they said, and its area of operation diminished to three districts from 11. But as the year comes to a close, the Islamic State is far from being vanquished in eastern Afghanistan, even as the group is on the run in its core territory in Iraq and Syria. It has waged brutal attacks that have displaced thousands of families and forced even some Taliban fighters, who had long controlled the mountainous terrain, to seek government protection. The shifting dynamic has, in turn, threatened the American-backed government’s tenuous hold on the region. And two years into the joint United States-Afghanistan operation, a clear understanding of the Islamic State affiliate, the latest enemy in the long Afghan war, still evades even some of those charged with fighting it. Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, recently said that 1,400 operations and airstrikes had “removed from the battlefield” more than 1,600 Islamic State fighters since March — more than double the estimate from early in the year. Some Afghan and other Western officials question whether those numbers are inflated, but the Americans say they are an... Link to the full article to read more