IS-K (Islamic State-Khorasan) a regional affiliate of the Islamic State group, has been proscribed as a terror organization by governments across the world.
It is focused on Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan and into Central Asia.
The group has given itself the name Khorasan as that was part of an historic Islamic caliphate spanning that region.
IS-K has been around for nine years but in recent months it has emerged as the most dangerous branch of the Islamic State group, with a long reach and a reputation for extreme brutality and cruelty, says the BBC.
Along with what is left of the group’s wider leadership in Syria and Iraq, IS-K aspires to a pan-national Islamic caliphate ruled through an ultra-strict interpretation of Sharia, Islamic law.
In Afghanistan it is waging a sporadic but still deadly insurgency against the country’s rulers, the Taliban, who it opposes on ideological grounds.
In the past three years, IS-K has previously planted a suicide bomb in in Kabul airport, killing 170 victims, then killed six at the Russia Embassy in Kabul, and killing nearly 100 at a double-bombing at an Iranian shrine.
The group has carried out indiscriminate attacks on a maternity ward, bus stations and policemen.
In Russia it has carried out numerous small-scale attacks, the most recent being in 2020 – and already this year the FSB, Russia’s internal security service, says it has stopped several terror plots.
IS-K consider most of the world to be their enemies. Russia is high up on their list, along with the US, Europe, Israel, Jews, Christians, Shia Muslims, the Taliban and all rulers of Muslim-majority states, who they consider to be „apostates”.
Islamic State’s hostility to Russia goes back to the Chechen wars in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Moscow’s forces devastated the Chechen capital Grozny.
More recently, Russia entered the Syrian civil war on the side of its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, and the Russian air force has carried out countless bombings of rebel and civilian positions, killing large numbers of Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda-linked fighters.
In Afghanistan, IS-K view Russia as being an ally of the Taliban, which is why they attacked the Russian embassy in Kabul in 2022.
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