The leader of the ISIL terrorist group in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been killed, Afghan intelligence officials say.

The Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) announced on Saturday that 65-year-old Hafiz Saeed Khan was killed on Friday evening along with 30 more ISIL militants in a US assassination drone strike in the Achin district of the eastern Nangarhar province near the border with Pakistan.

He “was killed in a gathering, an area where they were making plans,” the RT news agency quoted NDS spokesman Haseeb Sediqi as saying.

The Afghan security forces have retrieved and identified his body, Sediqi further said.

Saeed Khan, a formal Taliban strongman and one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, had pledged allegiance to ISIL in January.

In a similar attack carried out on July 6, Gul Zaman, the second-in-command of the ISIL terrorist group in Afghanistan has also been killed.

The restive Nangarhar province, where ISIL militants are most active, has witnessed an upsurge of clashes in the past weeks, mostly between ISIL and the Taliban, forcing thousands of civilians to flee their homes.

According to some media reports, ISIL has started recruiting militants in some regions of Afghanistan.

The United States launches targeted killings through drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

While Washington claims the targets of the attacks are militants, witnesses maintain that in most cases civilians have been the victims of the airstrikes.

The war-ravaged Afghanistan has been experiencing bloodshed since the United States and its Western allies invaded the country in 2001 as part of Washington’s so-called war on terror.