The Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, tweeted that Taliban special force had killed three militants and detained five others, who are reportedly suspected of shelling Uzbek border area on July 5.
According to him, those killed and detained militants are adherents of the Islamic religious and political affiliation of the Kharijites.
The militants were reportedly based in Imam Sahib district, Kunduz province, and one of the detained militants said they had shelled border areas in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the framework of an agreement between the National Resistance Front of Tajikistan and the Islamic State (IS) terror group.
Recall, the Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) says five projectiles struck at around 4:20 p.m. local time on July 5, but they did not explode. The shells struck four homes in a residential neighborhood in the southern city of Termez, but no one was hurt, said a statement released by the Uzbek MFA on the evening of July 5. A fifth reportedly landed in a soccer field. Nobody claimed responsibility.
As far as the claim by the IS terror group that militants from its affiliate active in Afghanistan, the Islamic State Khurasan Province or ISKP, on May 7 fired several rockets into Tajikistan, is concerned, the Main Border Guard Directorate at the State Committee for National Security of Tajikistan (SCNS) stated on May 8 that only bullets were shot across the border during fighting between Taliban forces and ISKP fighters in Afghanistan Takhar province. The Main Border Guard Directorate asserted that a gunfight that took place between the Taliban and ISKP militants in Khoja Ghor district on the border, opposite the Tajik area patrolled by the Panj border, on May 7 lasted around 90 minutes and that some projectiles had been incidentally fired across the border.
The Kharijites were an Islamic sect which emerged during the First Muslim Civil War (656–661). Ibadism is the only surviving sect from the Kharijite legacy in history. The first Kharijites were supporters of Ali who rebelled against his acceptance of arbitration talks to settle the conflict with his challenger, Mu'awiya, at the Battle of Siffin in 657. They asserted that "judgment belongs to God alone", which became their motto, and that rebels such as Mu'awiya had to be fought and overcome according to Qur'anic injunctions. Ali defeated the Kharijites at the Battle of Nahrawan in 658, but their insurrection continued. Ali was assassinated in 661 by a Kharijite seeking revenge for Nahrawan.
In the modern era, many Muslim theologians and clerics have compared the beliefs and actions of modern Islamists such as the IS, al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan to those of the Kharijites, labeling them as modern or neo-Kharijites.
