| Summary/Abstract |
After nearly two decades since the US invasion of Afghanistan, the country continues to wrestle with a plethora of problems. Political instability, deteriorating security, poor governance, unsuccessful peace talks with the Taliban, and the presence of 21 terrorist groups including the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) continue to haunt Afghanistan’s potential for a prosperous future. The official emergence of the ISKP in Afghanistan in 2015 brought with it a set of new challenges for the already war-torn country and complicated the path to peace as they came along with a violent ideology of a global jihad against the Afghan state, the Afghan Taliban, and the population of Afghanistan. The paper aims to critically analyse the ISKP’s rise since its emergence under the theoretical framework of the terrorist life cycle under four main categories: emergence, rise, downfall, and demise. The paper argues that despite suffering heavy losses and fighting a war on many fronts, the ISKP has learned to not just survive but thrive in certain aspects in Afghanistan. This has meant that despite several issues the group still continues to oscillate between the emergence and rise phase in the terrorist lifecycle and has yet to enter into the downfall or demise phase.
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