There are 7,000 fighters and thousands of reservists of ISIS in Afghanistan, Russian special presidential envoy and director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Second Asia Department Zamir Kabulov said on February 1, according to the Russian state-run news agency TASS.
“We have been carefully monitoring the genesis of the Afghan wing of ISIL [ISIS] over the past three years…The IS has nearly 7,000 active fighters, without taking into account several thousand of reservists,” Kabulov told the Rossiya-24 TV channel. The Taliban fighters’ number in Afghanistan currently stands at around 60,000 or 70,000,” TASS quoted Kabulov as saying. “”This is a serious case. The IS members have come to Afghanistan not for Jihad against the US and other foreign troops, they have come to set up a foothold for their further expansion to the north, to Central Asia.”
The diplomat added that the Afghan Army and the US-led coalition stay idle on detecting the ISIS reservists.