KABUL, Afghanistan — The former Guantanamo detainee allegedly responsible for trying to bring the Islamic State into southern Afghanistan was killed Monday in Helmand province, Afghan intelligence officials and police said.

A convoy carrying Mullah Abdul Rauf and several other Afghan Taliban fighters was hit by an airstrike while traveling in the Kajaki district in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province, officials said.

Other media outlets have reported that the attack was a drone strike, but that has not been confirmed by the NATO-led coalition.

Armando Perez, spokesman for the Resolute Support mission, confirmed that coalition forces conduced a “precision strike in Helmand province. The strike resulted “in the death of eight individuals threatening the force,” he said. But he did not identify Rauf as a target.

Rauf, a former high-ranking Taliban commander, began recruiting recently for the Islamic State in southern Afghanistan, according to media reports. Rauf “was one of the major targets of [Afghanistan’s] security forces for over the past month” because of his reported ties to the Islamic State, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency said Monday in a statement.

“And fortunately he was eliminated in this operation,” the National Directorate of Security said. .

“It is a great achievement that he was targeted before he was able to start attacks” in southern Afghanistan, Farid Obaid, provincial spokesman for the Afghan National Police in Helmand said.

A former corps commander responsible for Taliban fighters in Kabul and Herat during the group’s reign in Afghanistan in the 1990s, Rauf had been a U.S. detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until his release back to Afghanistan in 2007.

Another former Guantanamo detainee, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, had been identified by Pakistani intelligence as the Islamic State’s so-called emir in eastern Afghanistan. Dost has publicly renounced such claims but has expressed his solidarity with the Iraq and Syria-based terror group.

Zubair Babakarkhail contributed to this report.

munoz.carlo@stripes.com Twitter: @NatSecCarlo

Migrated