The Efficacy of Leadership Decapitation

By Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Price

Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Price, Ph.D, is the Director of the Combating Terrorism Center and an Academy Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of the U.S. Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. Government.

The Pentagon announced Friday that U.S. forces have killed Abu Sayed, the leader of ISIS-Khorasan – ISIS’ affiliate in Afghanistan – in a drone strike conducted in Afghanistan’s northeastern Kunar Province. In a statement released after the announcement of Sayed’s death, General John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said “this operation is another success in our campaign to defeat ISIS-K in Afghanistan in 2017. Abu Sayed is the third ISIS-K emir we have killed in the last year and we will continue until they are annihilated. There is no safe haven for ISIS-K in Afghanistan.”

In addition to Sayed, former leader of ISIS-K, Abdul Hasib, was killed during a joint U.S.-Afghan raid in April, while another former emir of the group, Hafiz Sayed Khan, was killed in a July 2016 U.S. drone strike.

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