It is hard to review Antonio Giustozzi's research. He says that over the years he has assembled a “battle-tested team” of “Afghan and Pakistani researchers,” mostly with a “background in journalism,” who have apparently gained access to many sources unavailable to other researchers. His conclusions in The Islamic State in Khorasan, such as the division of the Afghan Taliban into a set of relatively autonomous shuras (councils), often differ from other accounts, which also tend to rely on anonymous sources when they are not based on technical intelligence. As with so much research on covert operations and illegal organizations, there is an ethical limit to transparency.
That is even more the case with this study of the expansion of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Daesh, in its Arabic acronym) into Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it goes by the name “Islamic State—Khorasan” (IS-K). Giustozzi's researchers reported interviews with sixty-two members of IS-K, including leaders, cadres, and fighters, and fifty-nine more with leaders or members of other armed groups or their supporters, as well as smaller groups allied to IS-K.
This unique storehouse of information reveals a reality at odds with what many observers claim, set forth in Giustozzi's dry style, devoid of compromise with the reader's search for clarity. Afghanistan's former intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, has called the Islamic State (IS) a “fake” organization, meaning that it has been set up by the same Pakistani agencies that created the Taliban. Like many others, he doubts whether IS-K had any significant contact with IS headquarters.
Giustozzi and his sources, however give a different picture: IS is trying to export its superior organizational and financial model to the region it calls Khurasan, and a number of youth and former fighters have become sufficiently radicalized as to reject the Taliban's Stalinist “jihad in one country” in favor of the IS model of “jihad sans frontières.”
The organization itself seems to be a hodge-podge of Pakistanis who lost out when the Pakistani Taliban split and Afghans including both former Afghan Taliban, some of them radicalized during detention in Guantanamo, and youth dismayed at the willingness of their elders to negotiate and compromise with the United States or local garrisons of the Afghan Army.
Despite the attempts by IS-Central to control IS-K, however, it remains composed of discrete groups with different origins and different policies toward the local population. In the east of the country, IS-K is largely Pashtun, with many Pakistanis. This group has shown the greatest brutality in its dealings with the local population. It has also launched brutal sectarian attacks against Shi'a Afghans in Kabul.
In the north, IS-K seems to be largely Uzbek, including both disaffected locals and fighters from one branch or another of the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan. Scattered among them are also Uyghurs from Xinjiang in western China.
Giustozzi concludes that the pattern of IS recruitment did not develop spontaneously. He concurs with the Russian and Iranian beliefs that IS is taking a strategic view of Central Asia, which it has defined as its next target. The group is divided as to whether it is too early to start a campaign against China but has such a campaign in view.
The accumulation of details in The Islamic State in Khorasan, unverifiable as they may be, is ultimately persuasive but inconclusive. Clearly there is more substance to IS-K than some of its opponents admit, but it is hard to discern a pattern among all the reporting. How serious a threat is IS-K, and to what? This book does not answer the question, but it supplies many resources for puzzling over it.
