ISIS-K is spilling blood across thousands of miles.
There was the suicide bombing attack at the Kabul airport in August 2021 that killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 civilians. The group claimed responsibility for a deadly suicide bombing at the Russian embassy in Kabul the following year. Explosions at the memorial service for General Qasem Soleimani in Iran in January killed nearly 100 people. And in Russia in March, ISIS-K gunmen slaughtered 137 people at a concert hall.
The Islamic State-Khorasan is forging a reputation for ferocious violence aimed at civilians. The group operates out of eastern Afghanistan, out of the reach of its sworn enemy, the Taliban. It is an offshoot of ISIS in Iraq, which the U.S. and Iraqi militias defeated in 2017. Many fighters fled to Afghanistan and joined ISIS-K. The group is now said to be targeting ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks for recruitment rather than Pashtuns, who make up most of the Taliban’s ranks.
In this episode of History As It Happens, CNN national security analyst and terrorism expert Peter Bergen discusses the group’s origins, motives, ideas and aims.
“ISIS in Iraq and Syria was starting to feel a lot of pressure in 2015 from the U.S. military. By 2017, ISIS had been largely defeated in Iraq, but it did have a policy of setting up these regional affiliates. ISIS-K is partly a reaction against the Taliban…. If you look at the ideology of ISIS-K to see what they believe in, it’s mostly a very negative set of ideas. They are against the government of Pakistan. They are against the government of Iran. They are opposed to the government of Russia and the Taliban,” said Mr. Bergen, the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.”
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