Islamic State – Khorasan Province

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 Khorasan region with the goal of establishing a caliphate, governed under a strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law, which they plan to expand beyond the region.

ISIS–K is responsible for numerous 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 area 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 145 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.