This blog was written by Rashane Jude Pintoe (Student of MSc Security, Peacebuilding and Diplomacy) and was published on the Eurasia Review. Rashane is also a Fellow at the Global Peace Institute UK.

While the United Kingdom looks elsewhere, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) continues to churn out propaganda in English, Turkish, Russian and German – and somewhere on the continent, someone is listening.

The UK is dangerously behind the proscription curve. While allies from Washington to Canberra have long designated ISKP as a terrorist organisation, Britain has yet to take this most basic legal step available to protect its citizenry. The omission is not a case of bureaucratic tidiness or principled restraint, but a blind spot that an increasingly ambitious terrorist movement will not hesitate to exploit.

My upcoming book on “Islamic State 2.0: Wilayah Khurasan” will speak to the very dangers of this organisation outside its immediate area of operation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. ISKP’s novel strategy under the recent leadership of Sanaullah Ghafari, alias Shabab al-Muhajir is increasingly outward, targeting Central Asia, Russia and Europe.

The World’s Most Active IS Affiliate

ISKP was declared in eastern Afghanistan in 2015, forged from disgruntled fighters of the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, al-Qaeda and other smaller jihadist groups, who pledged loyalty to the then-IS caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The group waged a major war against both the Taliban and the US-led coalition in Afghanistan that resulted in major military engagements – including the only time the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, dubbed ‘Mother Of All Bombs’, was used in combat.

Although ISKP had greatly sunk in power by the late 2010s, it emerged strong under the new and resilient leadership of al-Muhajir. The group then went onto launch the deadly Abbey Gate suicide bombing at the Kabul airport in August 2021 that killed thirteen US servicemen during the botched Afghan withdrawal. Amongst the 182 people killed were two British dual nationals and a child of a British national.

In operational terms, ISKP is the most aggressive IS franchise in existence. Its record speaks for itself, including mass-casualty bombings across Afghanistan and Pakistan, attacks on Shiite places of worship and congregation, targeted assassination of Taliban officials, cross-border attacks in Iran and Russia, failed plots in countless countries in Europe, India and the US.

This is not a parochial insurgency. It is a movement with reach, discipline and a clearly articulated global mission.

A Threat To Europe – And To Britain

For European security agencies, IS has become the jihadist organisation most likely to attempt a mass-casualty attack on the continent. ISKP’s propaganda output has increasingly shifted towards appealing to Western audiences with all the calculated precision of IS. ISKP’s main propaganda magazine, the “Voice of Khurasan” has been published in several languages, including English, as a means of appealing to vulnerable individuals living in English-speaking regions. The 2025 report by the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) found seven ISKP terrorist plots in Europe, including in Germany, France, Austria, Sweden and Belgium.

The UK has already seen individuals attempting to travel to Afghanistan for the explicit purpose of joining ISKP’s training camps. This was witnessed when the brothers, Muhammad Abdul Haleem Heyder Khan and Muhammad Hamzah Heyder Khan, from Ward End in Birmingham and both 18 at the time, attempted to join ISKP in 2023. Another case was Farishta Jami from Stratford-upon-Avon who also saved money for a one-way ticket to Afghanistan to fight alongside ISKP. Although several of these attempts were stopped due to the strong monitoring capabilities of the British intelligence services, the attempts alone are a warning – the group is successfully penetrating the imagination of extremists inside Britain. At a time of national debate on the cases of IS fighters and sympathisers like Shamima Begum, Britain must not make the same mistakes it once did. Its online infrastructure is equally troubling. Channels affiliated with ISKP regularly celebrate and encourage terrorist attacks on European and American soil, call for new operations against the UK, and lionise past IS atrocities. For a group intent on re-establishing the Islamic State brand globally, Britain represents both symbolic and strategic value.

Britain’s Legal Blind Spot

The United States designated ISKP a Foreign Terrorist Organisation a decade ago in 2016. The United Nations (2019), Canada (2018), and Australia (2017) and have long followed suit. Yet the UK – despite its history of early and robust counterterrorism action – remains conspicuously silent. Under the Terrorism Act 2000, the Home Secretary may proscribe any organisation believed to be “concerned in terrorism”. The legal threshold is not high. The evidence against ISKP is overwhelming. So why the hesitation?

The most charitable explanation is bureaucratic inertia. The less charitable is strategic miscalculation. Some analysts suggest that London, like other governments, may be reluctant to inadvertently bolster the Taliban’s claim to be a counterterrorism partner by formally recognising their enemy as a terrorist threat. If so, that would represent a political logic so detached from operational reality that it borders on recklessness.

Terrorism designations are more than mere diplomatic gestures – they are security tools. Treating them otherwise invites avoidable risk to the legal fabric, national security policy and ultimately British lives.

What Proscription Actually Achieves

Proscription is far more than symbolic condemnation. It is the mechanism that criminalises membership, criminalises funding, procurement and propaganda, restricts online networks, enables arrests before plots mature, prevents travel for terrorist training, and closes legal loopholes in prosecuting facilitators, recruiters and financiers.

Without proscription, law enforcement is forced to work with a half-empty legal armoury. Individuals who spread ISKP propaganda, translate its materials, send money abroad or attempt to join the group cannot be prosecuted with the full force of terrorism offences available for other proscribed entities. In counterterrorism, such gaps are not academic – they are operational vulnerabilities.

The Lessons of IS Have Been Forgotten Too Quickly

Europe has been here before. For years, the rise of the Islamic State was treated as a distant curiosity – another regional insurgency in a crowded field of Middle Eastern conflicts. By the time IS swept through Mosul and al-Baghdadi declared the caliphate from the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in 2014, it had already incubated a wave of foreign fighters and a propaganda machine powerful enough to inspire attacks in Paris, Brussels, London and Manchester.

ISKP is not yet as powerful as IS at its peak, but it is more global, more ideologically refined, and far less constrained geographically. It thrives in a region where international attention has waned and where no state exercises full control. To leave such a group unproscribed is to repeat the same error that enabled the last major wave of jihadist violence.

The Cost of Inaction

Failing to proscribe ISKP carries three dangerous consequences:

1. It signals hesitation to those who watch for weakness

Terrorist organisations interpret inconsistency as opportunity. Britain’s silence stands out starkly against its allies’ clarity.

2. It undermines international coordination

Counterterrorism is built on shared designations. The UK’s outlier status complicates cooperation, intelligence alignment and enforcement.

3. It exposes British society to unnecessary risk

Online radicalisers, recruiters and facilitators enjoy more legal ambiguity than they should. A single successful ISKP-linked attack in Europe should dispel any illusion that this is a hypothetical concern. The upcoming book on ISKP goes into detail on how sites such as Threema, Tech Haven and Telegram have been extensively used by ISKP to communicate and propagate. The UK has its own problems with sites like EncroChat which is widely used by criminal networks from county-line drug syndicates and grooming gangs.

An Authoritative Understanding of the Threat

Researchers studying ISKP closely are unequivocal. ISKP is not merely another militant faction. It is the most globally oriented, externally focused, and ruthlessly violent branch of the Islamic State enterprise currently in operation. Its ambitions do not stop at Kabul or Karachi. They extend to Europe. They extend to Britain.

Therefore, Britain must close this gap, before ISKP opens one. Proscribing ISKP is neither radical nor controversial. It aligns Britain with international partners, equips security agencies with the tools they need and sends a clear message that this country will not wait for tragedy before recognising a threat that is already well understood.

The Home Office should act without delay. The cost of doing nothing could be far higher than the political convenience of inaction. Terrorist organisations exploit hesitation as ruthlessly as they exploit weakness. Britain cannot afford either.

The question is no longer whether ISKP intends to strike in Europe, but whether European governments can move faster than a terrorist group operating at digital speed.