The Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISIS–K) is a regional branch of the Islamic State terrorist group active in South-Central Asia, primarily Afghanistan. ISIS–K seeks to destabilize and overthrow existing governments of the historic Khorasan region to establish an Islamic caliphate under its strict, fundamentalist Islamist rule.
Background Prior to the birth of ISIS–K, a number of Islamic jihadist groups operated in South and Central Asia, many linked to Al-Qaeda. In Iran, groups included Jundullah, Harakat Ansar Iran, and Jaish al-Adl. Pakistan hosted hundreds of groups including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Sepah-e-Sahaba, and Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP). Tajikistan hosted groups such as Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, Jamaat Ansarullah, and Harakati Islamii Tajikistan. Other groups persisted on the periphery including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and the Uyghur-led Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP, a.k.a. East Turkestan Islamic Movement/ETIM). Each group would develop close relations with either Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
In response to failed negotiations with the Taliban following the September 11th 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.
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. Zarqawi was killed by US forces in June 2006.
By 2010, the Taliban resistance had become weakened under the stresses of factionalism and the Taliban had lost credibility to 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.
The Syrian civil war, where ISIS attained significant military power and attention for the sizeable terrain it controlled, began to attract slightly larger groups of Afghan and Pakistani militants, many of whom may have been disenchanted with the progress of the Afghan jihad. An April 2012 estimate by Russian security services described 200–250 Afghans and 250–300 Pakistanis from TTP involved in the conflict.
Prelude
A significant development came on 14 July 2012 as Hafiz Saeed Khan, a prominent TTP leader, agreed to rapidly assemble a group of 143 Afghan and Pakistani volunteer fighters for al-Qaeda to dispatch to join the al-Nusra Front in Syria. Similarly, as the Taliban's Quetta Shura and leadership council (Rahbari Shura) refused to send fighters to Syria, the Talban's Peshawar Shura and semi-autonomous Miran Shah Shura (better known as the Haqqani network) arranged a deal between Sirajuddin Haqqani and ISIS-leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to deploy Afghan and Pakistani jihadists to the Syrian conflict on salaries of $800 a month, four times that of Taliban fighters. Most importantly, these jihadist units fought as organized groups and would eventually be brought back to Afghanistan and Pakistan, unlike previous groups which were assimilated into local jihadist groups fighting in Syria. Deployments of groups by al-Qaeda in South Asia and by parts of the Taliban quickly made a remarkable impact on the Syrian conflict. From 2012 through 2014, the ranks of Afghans and Pakistanis in ISIS grew massively with at least 1,000 volunteers deployed by TTP alone.
Likely appreciative of the volunteer fighters supplied by groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the ISIS Military Commission in Syria offered ten TTP and Taliban volunteer group leaders from Saeed Khan's first dispatch $1 million to proselytize for the movement when they returned to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Beginning in November 2013, these group leaders began approaching members of each militant group including the Afghan Taliban, TTP, IMU, LeT, LeJ, and others to join the effort. These ten commanders would become ISIS–K's early senior figures including Sheikh Mohsin and Sa'ad Emarati who would become ISIS–K's first emirs of Kunar and Logar Province, respectively. In support of the growing movement, the Haqqani Network and Peshawar Shura, established two training camps in Waziristan and Kunar to teach militants combat skills, vet militants, and provide elementary Arabic language lessons. Once complete, these fighters would transit across Iran and Turkey to reach Syria, mostly posing as economic migrants, or by commercial flight for more senior leaders. At the time, commanders found it fairly easy to motivate fighters to join the fight in Syria as most assumed their former organization would eventually sign a peace deal with the Afghan or Pakistani government, and because the money was more attractive than the region's faltering Taliban donors. One senior ISIS–K member noted in June 2015 "many Arab countries support Daesh: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and others. They also have a lot of natural resources under their control, like oil wells." Beginning in mid-2013, the groups' leaders began to swear allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of the Islamic State, though it remains unclear how the militant's original organizations viewed these newly sworn allegiances or if others opted to remain loyal to al-Qaida's al-Nusra Front.
Through early 2014, even before the Islamic State would officially separate from al-Qaeda and declare a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, Al-Baghdadi (emir of ISIS), Muslim Turkmani (deputy emir), and Abu Omar al-Shishani (senior commander in Raqqa) had been advocating strongly that the volunteers set up a new branch (wilayah) in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the territories of Iran and Central Asia as later goals. On 3 April 2014, al-Shishani appointed Qari Wali Rahman, an Afghan from Baghlan who had been fighting in Syria since 2013, to be the Islamic State's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Disparate groups Even though the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria had agreed to the establishment of a branch in Khorasan, and though a single, special representative to the new branch had been named, the groups of volunteers from the Khorasan region (primarily Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan) were still disunited and dispersed. Only in 2014, had the groups began to form larger organizations and coalesce around a few key commanders. Author Antoni Giustozzi, who writes extensively on the formation of ISIS–K from interviews with senior members, identifies three key "coagulation points" in Afghanistan and one in Pakistan that would later merge to become ISIS–K.
In Afghanistan, three groups formed: Tehrik-e Khilafat Khorasan (TKK), Khilafat Afghan and Muslim Dost's Group, and Azizullah Haqqani's group.
Tehrik-e Khalifat Khorasan The first group in Khorasan to be officially recognized by and reportedly most enjoyed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, was Tehrik-e Khalifat Khorasan (, 'Movement of the Khorasan Caliphate', TKK). The group, substantially comprising Afghans from the country's east, was originally headed by Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost. Muslim Dost was replaced by Mawlavi Nasratullah Popolzai quickly and reasons for the replacement are largely unknown. Muslim Dost would leave TKK to establish his own group instead.
Khilafat Afghan and Muslim Dost The second coalescent group in Afghanistan was Khalifat Afghan (, 'Afghan Caliphate') which was led by Abdul Khadim Rauf. Khadim was an Alizai Pashtun from Helmand in southern Afghanistan who had originally served as the Taliban's provincial governor of Kunar until he was arrested by US forces and sent to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp until his release in 2007. Though he was a senior former cadre of the Taliban's Quetta Shura, Khadim fell out of favor with the Taliban who suspected that Khadim had grown close to Salafist ideas while detained. Khadim's close friend, Sa'ad Emarati, among the first Afghans sent by Hafiz Saeed Khan to join the jihad in Syria, arranged a formal invitation from the Islamic State emir, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to Khadim requesting that he form a group and join ISIS. Khadim formed Khilafat Afghan in 2013 with the 200 men he commanded in Helmand but grew his organization to 1,400 by January 2015.
Having left TKK, Muslim Dost joined Khliafat Afghan, but ended up clashing with Khadim in early 2015 and leaving Khilafat Afghan with 650 of the group's fighters – Muslim Dost's second such clash. Khilafat Afghan had managed to recover from its losses by October 2015 when it claimed 1,140 members. Khadim led the group and its operations in Helmand until he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Helmand in February 2015, succeeded by his nephew Wahidullah Wahid. 240 of Khilafat Afghan's personnel were support personnel with around 100 managing the group's logistics and finances in Pakistan and 80 members stationed at various headquarters in Doha (its main headquarters, indicative of the group's strong relationship with Qatar), North Waziristan, Nawa in Ghazni, and the UAE.
Following his unceremonious exist from Khilafat Afghan, Muslim Dost's new breakaway group would officially join ISIS–K on 6 March 2015, growing significantly in personnel thanks to ample funding from private Saudi donors. Even though he came from Kot District, Nangarhar, Muslim Dost recruited primarily from members of the Quetta Shura (access he was originally provided by his association with Khadim), though he broadened later to include his home province.
Azizullah Haqqani The third coalescent group in Afghanistan was a group led by Azizullah Haqqani. Azizullah, not to be confused with the brother by the same name of Sirajuddin Haqqani, had recruited entirely out of the Haqqani network and Hizb-i Islami. In 2014, Azizullah was temporarily expelled from his senior position on the Miran Shah Shura for his exclusive recruitment of members from the Haqqani network. Azizullah was able to later reconcile with Sirajuddin and regain his position on the shura, until Azizullah resumed his recruitment of Haqqani network leaders, drawing the anger of Sirajuddin in October 2016 and his permanent sacking from the shura.
Tehrik-e Khlifat Pakistan