Islamic State of Khorasan Province

The first peak of ISKP attacks occurred in October 2021-February 2022. This peak of activity was triggered by two reasons - the chaos in the country after the transfer of power to the Taliban and a general change in the tactics of ISKP military operations.

After the very painful defeats inflicted on ISKP by Afghan forces and ISAF in 2019-2020, ISKP switched to a combination of a large number of small attacks. This change in tactics was the result of pressure on ISKP by ISAF, the Afghan army and, after 7.09.2021, Taliban security forces. ISKP was forced to decentralize, take its combat cells underground and move its operations to the cities. By the end of 2021, ISKP had lost most of the territories it controlled. Having lost its footholds in the rural areas of the east of the country, ISKP established itself in the cities. In this way it received a temporary advantage over the Taliban, which had little experience in counterterrorism in urban areas.

The return to the cities allowed it to replenish its losses relatively quickly. ISKP returned to a familiar theater of operations, where it was also easier to recruit among the educated classes, especially Salafis, whose largest communities reside in Kabul and Nangahar.

Following the almost universal amnesty announced by the Taliban in early September 2021, ISKP’s ranks were replenished by several hundred militants released by the Taliban. This allowed ISKP to conduct an active campaign to eliminate Taliban militants and officials.

In late 2021, the Taliban considered ISKP to be the main internal threat and launched a large-scale campaign against it. As a result of the clashes, ISKP suffered a major defeat in Nangahar and was forced to move its bases to neighbouring Kunar. Operations against the Taliban during the first 6 months of 2022 were sporadic and limited to killing individual Taliban and attacks with grenade launchers and mortars on Taliban checkpoints. In addition to the traditional theater of operations in the east, ISKP expanded the geography of its operations to the south and west of the country. It is unlikely that the terrorist attacks in the north that were committed in 2022, for which ISKP claimed responsibility, have been carried out by it; most likely, these were attacks by the emerging AFF or local Tajik self-defense forces that prevented the Taliban administration fr om gaining a foothold in their communities. This may be further evidenced by the general focus of ISKP attacks on mainly Shiite Hazaras and Sufi communities. ISKP failed to gain a foothold in the north of the country, wh ere the population supports the NRF, AFF and a number of smaller opposition groups.

Due to the inability to gain a foothold in the north, ISKP attacks on Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were purely symbolical. Hamas-style cross-river missile strikes had only a symbolic meaning which was to demonstrate to everyone that the Taliban was incapable of securing Afghanistan’s borders.

ISKP operations and its very existence were put on the line when, by early 2023, financial flows fr om the Islamic State’s Turkey-based “global headquarters” had virtually dried up. ISKP funding had been declining since approximately the last months of 2018 due to ISIS’s defeats in Syria and Iraq, wh ere ISIS lost control of oil fields and was forced to go underground in most of Syria and Iraq. 

In addition to the decline in funding, the ISKP crisis in early 2023 was exacerbated by the Taliban’s success in disrupting the mechanism for transferring large amounts of money from Turkey to Afghanistan for ISIS leadership. Several raids on ISIS bases in Turkey, coordinated between the Taliban and Turkish intelligence services, and the arrests of several dozen ISIS members in Turkey and about 30 in Afghanistan made it impossible to transfer hefty sums. ISIS was forced to switch to a system of multiple transfers of small amounts (from $500 to $5,000) via couriers. In 2022, the Taliban tightened control over hawala agents to prevent their use to transfer even small amounts. This led to a near-total halt in all ISKP activity from December 2022 to approximately March 2023. During the first 6-9 months of 2023, ISKP focused on reorganization, increasing the level of conspiracy, and searching for alternative sources of funding. By the end of 2023, the results of security operations against ISKP indicated that the organization had managed to retain its core cadre militants and replace its leadership, however their financial situation remained unsatisfactory. In February 2023 alone, the Taliban intercepted 12 couriers delivering cash to ISIS.

 

The large-scale campaign to eradicate drug trade has significantly limited the ability of ISKP to finance its activities by protecting and transporting opiate raw materials to Pakistan. According to Afghan contacts who the author managed to communicate with in the spring of 2024, despite the fact that a complete financial collapse was avoided, the financial capabilities of ISKP have not yet reached the level of 2021.

Despite the financial crisis, ISKP remained very active. In 2023, ISKP went completely underground, created several mobile training bases and caches of weapons and ammunition scattered throughout the country (except for the Panjshir Gorge and Mazar-i-Sharif). 

In order not to fall out of the headlines of the global media and to ensure an influx of new members, ISKP has developed vigorous activity on social media and the Internet. The organization's main website was completely redesigned, regular publication of the Al-Azaim magazine began, and videos covering the activities and ideology of ISKP started appearing regularly. Much of this video material was aimed at creating the impression of the power of ISKP and the major battles with enemies and terrorist attacks against infidels being allegedly under preparation.

  

Despite the relative stabilization of the financial situation in late 2023 and early 2024, both the Taliban Interior Ministry and the AFF are confident that after the liquidation of the organization's leadership, including its leader Ilyas Ahangar in the spring of 2023, ISKP was unable to recruit enough new members to resume large-scale military operations in the country. Even with the new recruits coming from Qatar and Pakistan and a recruiting campaign in Taliban camps, ISKP was unable to launch any significant offensive against the Taliban in 2024. Financing isolated terrorist attacks outside Afghanistan is clearly insufficient to sustain ISKP's large-scale operations in the country.

 

ISKP's virtual activities alone will not be able to revive the organization. Its resurrection as the Taliban's main competitor for controling Afghanistan will depend on a number of factors:

ISKP's ability to recover from the raids and arrests of its leadership and the destruction of its funding system by Turkish intelligence and Taliban security forces in 2022-2023;

ISKP's ability to maintain organizational and operational unity in the face of a severe financial crisis;

The Taliban's ability to maintain its unity;

The level of skill of the Taliban security forces and their ability to infiltrate ISKP's agents; and

ISKP's ability to find new sources and create an effective system of financing its activities.

The arrests of some Tajik Taliban in the north of the country in late 2023 and early 2024 could expand IS-PK's recruiting opportunities, provided that these arrests are a sign of possible ethnic cleansing within the Taliban. However, even the most optimistic Western analysts do not consider these arrests a sign of growing contradictions within the movement. 

Despite its obvious issues, IS-PK remains a serious threat to the Taliban. It is possible that IS-PK's Salafism may become more attractive to young Afghans than the Taliban's Deobandism due to its more flexible position on women's rights and the absence of bans on music and modern means of communication.

 

Foreign Armed Groups and Organizations

The Taliban's conflict with the above-mentioned groups has generated the bulk of the violence and clashes in the country since August 2021. Besides, several foreign paramilitary groups and organizations pose a certain threat to the Taliban and security in the country, even if they do not commit terrorist attacks inside Afghanistan.

The most prominent example was the presence of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul. In addition to al-Qaeda, several other similar groups have some presence in the country: Jamaat Ansarullah, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Toiba, the remnants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, various organized crime groups of Uighur bandits and racketeers.

Among this motley “troops,” the well-organized and focused on the struggle to create a global caliphate Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) stands out. The TTP has a social base and it recruits fighters from both sides of the Durand Line. Most officials in Pakistan's Federal Tribal Areas bordering southern Afghanistan are either TTP members or were brought to power and rely on the TTP in their work. The unification of the Pashtun tribal areas with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which began in 2019, did not reduce the influence of the TTP or replace the leadership with people unaffiliated with the TTP. Moreover, the transfer of power in Afghanistan to the Taliban forced Pakistan to begin negotiations with the TTP on joint governance of the tribal areas. The TTP is a donor of fighters for ISKP. This situation is considered unacceptable by the TTP leadership, which held several meetings with ISKP in Peshawar in 2023 and the first half of 2024 to prevent militants from defecting to ISKP. The transition has slowed down recently due to the difficult financial situation of ISKP. The TTP leadership believes that abandoning jihad in Pakistan could lead to a mass exodus of fighters from the organization.

 

This confirms the claims of the Pakistani authorities that without safe bases in Afghanistan, the TTP in Pakistan will inevitably die. It follows that at some point the TTP may enter into some kind of alliance with ISKP, perhaps creating some kind of common “fighter pool” from which each organization will draw resources for specific actions.

To some extent, the TTP and ISKP are already cooperating in Pakistan, if the reports on their pages on the X network are true. First, the TTP page indicates that the groups have divided the rights to impose tribute on the population of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This allowed ISKP to avoid financial collapse in 2023. Secondly, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, areas controlled by the TTP overlap with areas controlled by ISKP. The TTP generally views ISKP as a competitor and an inevitable evil that must be tolerated because it cannot be destroyed. 

So far, there is no information about the Taliban requesting the TTP to leave the country. However, back in the summer of 2022, the Taliban asked the TTP not to use Afghanistan as a base for terrorist attacks on neighboring countries. It is known that the Taliban met with the TTP leadership on this issue in the summer of 2022 in Islamabad, but without any concrete results.

In 2023, the Taliban unsuccessfully requested the TTP to withdraw its fighters from Afghanistan. Instead, the TTP leadership staged a show raid on Chitral, involving many of Afghan volunteers. This prompted the first retaliatory raid on TTP safe houses, during which Taliban security forces arrested several dozen TTP fighters who had taken part in the Chitral raid. However, after the show arrests, most of the fighters were released.

The problem is primarily in the negative attitude of ordinary Taliban towards the Pakistani government and sympathy for the TTP. There is a widespread belief among ordinary Taliban that the TTP's jihad against Islamabad should be supported. Therefore, it is difficult for the Taliban central leadership to ban the TTP without the risk of losing a significant part of its support in the south and southwest of the country.

The Pakistani government constantly puts pressure on the Taliban to ban the TTP in Afghanistan. Having failed to achieve its goal, Islamabad began extraditing several hundred thousand Afghans who had ended up in Pakistan after August 2021 in late 2023. In combination with the Pakistani army's artillery and rocket attacks on adjacent Afghan territory, the Taliban announced a review of relations with the TTP, but as of the date of writing, there is no information on the results of the review or practical steps. If the Taliban begins, for example, resettling Pakistani Afghans to the north of the country, this could create a real opportunity for a full-scale revival of ISKP. 

At the moment, terrorist groups that maintain relations with the Taliban prefer not to engage in direct confrontation with them. Given the commonality of the ideological platform and historical and tribal ties, it can be assumed that the transition of one of these groups to direct armed opposition will not only be the most serious challenge to the Taliban security forces but can undermine the internal unity of the Taliban itself. 

On the other hand, the Taliban, having become the de facto government of the country, has to react to the criminal activities of such groups. In private conversations, sources close to the Taliban government and the Ismaili opposition claim that the Taliban is taking measures to reduce the influence and presence of such organizations in the country.