As many as 300 inmates, many of who are Taliban and Islamic State followers, have escaped from an Afghan prison after a protracted attack by ISIS that lasted nearly 20 hours.
The attack began Sunday evening in the city of Jalalabad when a suicide bomber slammed an explosive-laden vehicle into the security perimeter of a major prison complex housing. Militants then used the opening to storm the complex and began a gun battle with Afghan security forces that lasted nearly 20 hours.
ISIS’s Khorasan Province branch, which operates primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan, claimed responsibility soon after the assault began. ISKP first came to fore in 2015 and has since grown and committed a number of atrocious attacks against civilian and military targets, including a bloody May attack on a Kabul maternity ward.
Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the governor of Nangarhar province, said that Sunday’s lengthy bombing and gun battle killed at least 29 people and wounded 48 others, including civilians, according to the New York Times. Afghan Lt. Gen. Yasin Zia, who is chief of the Afghan army, said 10 ISKP attackers were killed in the subsequent fighting.
At the time of the bombing, there were reportedly about 1,800 inmates inside the complex, many of them Taliban and ISIS fighters, although the prison was also used to house general criminals. Of those who escaped, some 1,000 have been brought back to the prison, more than 50 have been injured, and 430 have been rescued. About 300 escapees are thought to be on the loose after the assault.
The attack came during a ceasefire between the Taliban and Afghan forces to mark Eid al-Adha, an Islamic festival celebrated by Muslims across the world. The Taliban, through its spokesman, immediately denied responsibility for the Jalalabad attack after the bombing.
The attack itself is one of the most complicated operations carried out by ISKP since its arrival to the region. ISKP also has a new leader who released a statement recently that said the terrorist branch would not “sit idle” while ISIS fighters were held captive, the BBC reported.
The Jalalabad attack bookended the three-day Eid al-Adha ceasefire between the government and the Taliban, as just hours before it began on Thursday, a car bomb in Logar province killed more than a dozen people.
Massoud Andarabi, Afghanistan’s interior minister, made comments after the Thursday attack tying the Haqqani network to ISKP. The Haqqani network is a militant group that has been historically tied to the Taliban.
“Shahab Almahajir, the newly appointed leader of Islamic State of Khorasan Province, or ISKP, is a Haqqani member,” Andarabi said. “Haqqani and the Taliban carry out their terrorism on a daily basis across Afghanistan, and when their terrorist activities do not suit them politically, they rebrand it under ISKP.”
While ISIS’s territorial caliphate previously located in Syria and Iraq has been eradicated, it still has branches, such as ISKP, Islamic State in West Africa, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, and others, that carry out brutal attacks against military and civilians.
The United States scored a major victory in October when ISIS’s then-leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi died in a Delta Force operation. The State Department announced in June that it was offering $10 million for information about the identity or location of ISIS’s new leader Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahma al Mawla.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the State Department for comment about ISKP’s attack in Jalalabad and the branch’s existence in the region.
