Islamic State Khorasan

Islamic State Khorasan

Subject – Security

Context –Scores of people were killed in several explosions at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai Airport.

Concept –

• The Afghan offshoot of the terror organization “Islamic State,” known as ISIS-Khorasan, IS-K or ISIS-K claimed responsibility for the attacks.
• The group takes its name from the Khorasan Province, an area that once included wide swaths of Afghanistan, Iran and central Asia in the Middle Ages.
• Jihadis divided by ideology, goals IS-K and the Taliban have been locked in bloody battles with one another for some time.
• An ideological gulf separates the two militant groups. While the IS belongs to the Salafist movement of Islam; the Talibanadhere to the Deobandi school.
• For IS-K, the Taliban’s views are not strict enough on Sharia Law.. IS fighters have called the Taliban apostates and bad Muslims because of their willingness to negotiate a peace deal with the United States. By doing so, they betrayed the goals of the jihad, IS fighters said.
• IS-K has between 500 and 1,500 fighters in Afghanistan and has strengthened its positions in and around the capital, Kabul, where it carries out most of its attacks.
• IS is also counting on an influx of fighters from Syria, Iraq and other conflict zones.
• The IS-K took arms against the Taliban in 2017 when they drove the Taliban out of the mountainous Tora-Bora region. Tora-Bora’s deep tunnel system was where al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden had initially taken refuge from US retaliatory strikes following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
• IS-K originally emerged in Pakistan as an armed student group belonging to the umbrella organization, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. Fearing persecution at home, they fled across the border to Afghanistan and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and IS chief Baghdadi in 2014, who since has been killed.