What we know about Islamic State in Khorasan, aka ISIL-K, ISKP

 ISIL-K has claimed responsibility for the deadly suicide attacks outside Kabul airport. Here’s what we know about this group.

The Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), also known as ISIL-Khorasan or ISIL-K, has claimed responsibility for the deadly suicide attacks outside Kabul airport that killed at least 72 Afghans and 13 US soldiers, and left dozens injured.

ISIL-K said its suicide bombers singled out “translators and collaborators with the American army” in the attacks on Thursday evening.

Also among the dead were 28 Taliban members, according to the group that is now ruling Afghanistan.

ISIL-K is known as an offshoot of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh) that was seeking to establish a new caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Khorasan is a reference to an historical region under an ancient caliphate that once included parts of Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Turkmenistan.

The armed group was formed in 2014 by breakaway fighters of the Pakistani Taliban, and fighters from Afghanistan who pledged allegiance to the late ISIL leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

ISIL-K has strong roots in northeastern Afghanistan, but set up sleeper cells in Kabul and other provinces.

They are adversaries of the Taliban, with different teachings of strict Sunni beliefs.

In a 2014 interview with Al Jazeera, Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, said that ISIL-K is “not actually a separate group,” but rather a contingent of al-Qaeda members coming from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

Bloody rampage

Since its inception, some of the most hardline ISIL-K fighters have travelled from Afghanistan to Iraq and Syria to fight and help ISIL, as well as plot attacks on Western targets.

While it is not clear how many fighters have joined the group, ISIL-K has been responsible for some of the worst attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent years, killing people at mosques, public squares and even hospitals.

A bloody rampage at a maternity ward in Kabul in May 2020 that killed 24 people, including women and infants, was also blamed on the group.

ISIL-K has been critical of any cooperation between the Taliban and the United States, including deals to withdraw foreign troops.

Rasha al-Aqeedi, head of the nonstate actors programme of think-tank Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, said that ISIL-K will be using the attacks as propaganda.

“The end-game of ISIL-K, or ISIL in general wherever it operates, doesn’t have to be an immediate strategic goal. They carry out these operations with the intention of causing as much carnage as possible for the purpose of showing that they are still around, that they are still a threat,” al-Aqeedi said.

“Their modus operandi is very similar to ISIL in Iraq and Syria,” she added.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA, REUTERS

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