The Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISKP or ISIS–K) is a regional branch of the Salafi jihadist group Islamic State (IS) active in Central and South Asia, primarily Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. ISIS–K seeks to destabilize and replace current governments within the historic Greater Khorasan region encompassing modern-day Central Asian polities, with the goal of establishing a caliphate, governed under a strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law, which they plan to expand beyond the region through the establishment of a worldwide Islamic state.
ISIS–K is responsible for numerous terror attacks targeting civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, predominately against Shia Muslims, politicians, and government employees. In August 2017, ISIS–K attacked several villages inhabited by the Shia Hazara minority in northern Afghanistan, resulting in the mass murder of Hazara men, women, and children within Sar-e Pol Province. Some of its most notable attacks include the 2021 Kabul airport attack that killed 13 American military personnel and at least 169 Afghans in Kabul during the U.S. withdrawal from the country, twin suicide bombings in July 2018 that killed at least 131 at election rallies in Pakistan, twin bombings in July 2016 that killed 97 Shia Hazara protestors in downtown Kabul, and a suicide bombing in July 2023 that killed 63 in Khar, Pakistan at a JUI (F) rally.
While the majority of ISIS–K attacks occur in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, ISIS–K has expanded to conduct external operations beyond its traditional field of operations. In April 2022, ISIS–K launched rockets from Afghan territory into the country's northern neighbor Uzbekistan, and in May into Tajikistan. In January 2024, two ISIS–K attackers carried out twin suicide bombings in Kerman, Iran, during a procession mourning the US assassination of Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani, killing 94. In March 2024, four Tajik ISIS–K gunmen launched an attack on a concert hall in Krasnogorsk, Russia, with rifles and incendiaries, killing 151 and marking the group's first attack beyond Afghanistan's neighbors. In June 2024, US officials arrested eight Tajik men in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, who were reportedly involved in an ISIS–K plot within the United States, with connections to a larger ISIS–K cell being monitored in Central Europe. All eight were said to have entered the United States illegally across the U.S. border with Mexico.
ISIS–K first began with the dispatch of Afghan and Pakistani militants from al-Qaeda-aligned groups to the Syrian civil war, who eventually joined the ISIS caliphate and returned home with instructions and funding to recruit fighters for a branch of the Islamic State in the Khorasan region. The group's traditional base of power began and remains in eastern Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan, recruiting from dissenters and dissatisfied former fighters of the Taliban as well as individuals from South and South East Asia.
Reflecting the contentious and fluid nomenclature within the larger Islamic State organization, ISIS–K is referred to by various names. The larger organization has shifted between names such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Islamic State of Iraq and as-Sham (ISIS), and later simply the Islamic State (IS). Added to the larger organization's name, 'Khorasan Province' varies in abbreviation between 'K' and 'KP'. Thus, commonly used English abbreviations for the group include ISIS–K, ISIL–K, IS–K, ISIS–KP, ISIL–KP, IS–KP, ISISK, ISK, and ISKP.
Colloquially, especially in southwest and south-central Asia, the group is referred to by the Arabic acronym of the larger Islamic State: Daesh or Dāʿish (داعش), which stands for ad-Dawlah al-Islamīyah fī l-ʻIrāq wa ash-Shām). This name is considered derogatory in Arabic-speaking Iraq and Syria, as it resembles the words Daes (دَعَسَ, lit. 'to trample', 'to run over') and Dāhis (دَاحِس, lit. 'one who causes discord'). The name 'Daesh' is also used in the area of ISIS–K's operations, including among Farsi, Dari, Pashto, Balochi, and Urdu speakers. In interviews with western researchers and journalists, ISIS–K members and heads alike use the term 'Daesh' to describe the movement, despite its derogatory connotations.
The term 'Wilayah', translated as 'Province' comes from the Arabic term for an administrative subdivision, led by a wali (governor), the primary subdivision of historic Islamic caliphates. The Islamic State uses the term Wilayat for each of its regional branches, such as Islamic State – West Africa Province (ISWAP).
The term 'Khorasan' refers to Greater Khorasan, a historical eastern region of the Iranian Plateau between Western and Central Asia. Khorasan was first established as a region under the Persian Sasanian Empire and expanded under the Umayyad Caliphate. Today, the lands of the Khorasan region include northeastern Iran, most of Afghanistan, and the southern areas of Central Asia. The Greater Khorasan region is not to be confused with similarly named North, South, and Razavi (Central) Khorasan Provinces of modern Iran.
ISIS–K's first wali, Hafiz Saeed Khan, in a 2016 interview featured in the Islamic State's 13th issue of the magazine Dabiq, described the region of Khorasan and its significance:
Wilāyat Khurāsān has great importance to Islam and the Muslims. It had once been under the authority of the Muslims, along with the regions surrounding it. Afterwards, the secularist and Rāfidī [rejectionists, Shia] murtaddīn [apostates] conquered some of these regions, and the cow-worshipping Hindus and atheist Chinese conquered other nearby regions, as is the case in parts of Kashmir and Turkistan. So the Wilāyah, by Allah’s permission, is a gate to re-conquering all these regions until they are ruled once more by Allah’s law, and so the territory of the blessed Khilāfah [caliphate] is expanded.
Prior to the official establishment of ISIS–K in 2015, a number of Islamic militant jihadist groups operated in South and Central Asia, seeking to supplant existing governments with a more fundamentalist, Islamist government. These groups fought against the governments of Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and China, most with support from al-Qaeda which had operated with a base of operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 1988. In response to failed negotiations with the Taliban following the 11 September 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States, the U.S. overthrew the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and launched a military campaign against al-Qaeda and Taliban militants who fought to reclaim the country. The insurgent conflict became a focal point for jihadism in the Khorasan region with nearly every jihadist group in the region taking part to varying degrees.
Later in 2003, the United States overthrew the Ba’athist government of Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein. Jamat al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad ('Organization of Monotheism and Jihad'), led by Jordanian Salafist jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, quickly gained notoriety for bloody attacks on Shia mosques, civilians, Iraqi government, American, and foreign troops. In 2004, Zarqawi swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden and the group became part of Ayman al-Zawahiri's campaign against the United States, becoming known as al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI. Under the 2007 surge of American troops in Iraq, AQI was diminished until 2011 when the group newly under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, began to reemerge and spread into the nascent Syrian civil war. Capturing a number of cities in Iraq and Syria, notably Raqqa, Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit, Ramadi, Aleppo, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (rebranded later to 'Islamic State') declared an Islamic caliphate in 2014 with al-Baghdadi as caliph.
By 2010, the Taliban resistance had become weakened under the stresses of factionalism, and the Taliban had lost credibility with many of the jihadist groups for its attempts to negotiate with NATO forces. In contrast, the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in March 2011 shifted the attention of jihadists from the Afghan jihad to the Levant. With jihadist groups flocking to take part in the conflict, al-Qaeda's branches in Afghanistan and Pakistan began lobbying to send groups of fighters to join the Syrian jihad, a measure to demonstrate to the world that al-Qaeda was still actively involved in a global jihad, especially as donor states' interest in the Afghan jihad faded in favor of the surging ISIS campaign in Syria. Although al-Qaeda-linked Afghan and Pakistani jihadists had traveled to fight in the Levant as early as 2003, most groups had been small in number and quickly integrated into assorted ISIS units.