Over the previous two years, as ISIS has been stripped of its territory across Syria and Iraq, it has established itself as a threat in Afghanistan to both the Taliban and the Afghan Government. ISIS’ regional branch, the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (IS-K), has adopted a contradictory relationship with the Taliban and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) since its formal establishment in January 2015. Despite some initial cooperation between the militant groups based upon ideological affinity, the IS-K has since appealed to its global supporters to assist in strengthening its position in Afghanistan to establish the country as its new major theatre of conflict at the expense of the Taliban and the TTP. By March 2018, the central ISIS leadership released a video, which appealed to foreign supporters to travel to the IS-K in Afghanistan if they could not reach Syria or Iraq.
According to the United States, the IS-K has accumulated approximately 2,000 militants of both national and foreign origin. Russian estimates, however, put the number as high as 5,000. At the start of this year, the IS-K’s rapid expansion enabled the militant group to increase the territory under its control in the eastern Afghan provinces of Nuristan, Nangarhar and Kunar, at the expense of both the Afghan Government and the Taliban.
Similar to ISIS, the IS-K has defined itself with battlefield tactics of unrestrained violence on both military and civilian targets. Last year, the IS-K was held responsible for 20% of civilian casualties, according to the annual report published by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). This is a significant increase on 2017, in which the group was held responsible for 10% of civilian casualties. The UNAMA figures suggest that the IS-K is rapidly growing in strength despite ISIS no longer holding any territorial control in Syria and Iraq. The expansion of the IS-K could also serve to weaken the Taliban over a much longer period. Indeed, some Taliban factions with greater trans-national ambitions have already pledged allegiance to the IS-K.
The outward-looking IS-K contrasts sharply against the nationalist ambitions of the Taliban, which has recently completed its sixth round of negotiations with the US in Qatar in an attempt to bring the Afghan conflict to an end. Indeed, it has been alleged by the US that a recent wave of IS-K attacks on Kabul could be the starting point for the group to conduct further attacks in the US and Europe, in addition to within Afghanistan against the US and the Taliban. This could emulate the strategies of ISIS at its height in 2015 and 2016, which relied on its status of a self-proclaimed caliphate to prompt individualist attacks against civilian targets internationally. An uptick in attacks by the IS-K could also hinder future attempts to implement a deal between the Taliban and the US, thus extending the Afghan conflict once again.
The symbolic territorial defeat of ISIS in Baghouz, Syria, in March this year, in addition to a higher level of security across both Syria and Iraq compared to pre-2014, could prompt the central leadership of ISIS to focus its future operations on the IS-K in Afghanistan. Doing so could provide ISIS with both a means of retaining its global reputation as a militant group in control of territories, whilst providing ISIS’ low-level insurgency in Syria and Iraq with a greater source of coordination. Nevertheless, the rapid expansion of the IS-K has demonstrated the strength and global influence that ISIS has retained, even with the loss of its self-proclaimed caliphate.