On Thursday August 26, 2021, thirteen US service members were killed and 18 injured in an attack at Kabul’s airport, CNN reported. More than 90 Afghans were killed in the attack and at least 150 wounded, according to the report. A group called ISIS-K claimed responsibility, the report said. What is ISIS-K and what do they want?
According to Ctvnews, ISIS-K is a branch of ISIS that was established in January 2015 by disgruntled members of Taliban’s Pakistani affiliate and have been a sworn enemy of the Taliban.
As their name suggests, their goal is to establish a caliphate, or an Islamic empire governed by Sharia law, in the historic Khorasan region, which encompasses large parts of Central and South Asia.
The Islamic State Khorasan formed in late 2014 and operates as an ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Khorasan is a historical term for a region that includes present-day Afghanistan and parts of the Middle East and Central Asia. The group is also known as ISIS-K or IS-K.
The founding members included militants who left both the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban.
“ISIS had sent representatives to both Pakistan and Afghanistan. They were essentially able to co-opt some disaffected Pakistani Taliban and a few Afghan Taliban [members] to join their cause,” Seth Jones, an Afghanistan specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Very sad!
ISIS-K coalesced in eastern Afghanistan six years ago, and rapidly grew into one of the more dangerous terror threats globally.
The Islamic State’s Central Asia affiliate sprang up in the months after the group’s core fighters swept across Syria and Iraq, carving out a self-styled caliphate, or Islamic empire, in the summer of 2014. In Syria and Iraq, it took local and international forces five years of subsequent fighting to roll back the caliphate.
Source: 6abc.com
ISIS-K is ISIS-affiliated terrorist group in Afghanistan. The K in ISIS-K stands for Khorasan, the Islamic State’s affiliate in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
According to usatoday, the group considers the Taliban, whose harsh rule of Afghanistan ended in 2001 and has mounted an 18-year insurgency, to be too lax in its interpretation of Islam, the report said.
ISIS-K fights the Taliban daily and has seized territory from it. ISIS-K fighters decapitated a local imam, sympathetic but insufficiently devout, and put his head on a pike as a warning to villagers, according to the report.