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Express.co.uk, 12 December 2017

The terrorist organisation no longer have a physical home after Iraq and Syria were officially liberated from its clutches in the past month.

Now, Nikita Mendkovich says Afghanistan may be the next place that the extremists try to set up home.

He said: “There has been long time instability in Afghanistan and a high level of terrorist activity in the context of the weakness of the governmental security agencies.

 “Currently, the groups fighting under the Islamic State flag are active in many regions of Afghanistan, including the Nangarhar Province and in some northern areas, like Kunduz.”

The country has struggled to rid themselves of jihadis and have been involved in a civil war against extremism for years.

US troops have been present in Afghanistan since 2001 to try and help bring peace and security in the region.Around 200 fighters, some from Syria, joined the ISIS-affiliated Jowzjan province of Afghanistan in November increasing the chances of an attempt to relocate to the country.

However, Afghanistan is not the only place that the analyst said ISIS were looking to infiltrate.

Mr Mendkovich told RT: “There’s a risk of withdrawal of separate militant units to Libya and Egypt, where there are regions with instability, especially, in Libya, where the civil war is, in fact, ongoing.”

“They can join the ranks of groups associating themselves with IS and fight on their side.”

On December 10 Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said the war against ISIS in their country was over – three years after IS militants seized a third of the country’s territory.

It was just one week earlier that Russia said that its forces had destroyed all ISIS strongholds in Syria following a bombing campaign.

Colonel-General Sergei Rudskoi, head of the general staff’s operations, said: “The mission to defeat bandit units of the Islamic State terrorist organisation on the territory of Syria has been accomplished.”

Iraq and Syria were seen as the axis of the ISIS “caliphate”.

At present it is not clear if they will once again try to form a physical home somewhere else in the Middle East or whether they will only operate underground.