Europe has finally begun treating Islamic State Khorasan Province not as a distant Afghan franchise, but as a transnational organisation capable of moving people, money, propaganda and operational instructions across continents. Between June 1 and 5, Europol coordinated one of its most significant recent operations against individuals linked to ISKP. The investigation focused largely on suspects of Chechen and Central Asian origin and involved police and intelligence agencies across Europe and the United States. More than one hundred gigabytes of information were exchanged, travel routes linking Europe, South America and North America were reconstructed, cryptocurrency trails were examined and several suspects were arrested. The operation demonstrated the new geography of ISKP. Its militants may originate in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya or Afghanistan. Its facilitators may live in Belgium, Germany, Spain or Italy. Its money may move through cryptocurrency platforms and informal financial networks. Its propaganda circulates globally. Yet the expansion of ISKP should not obscure the place where much of this story began: Pakistan. ISKP was formally announced in January 2015, but its organisational foundations had already emerged from the fragmentation of militant groups operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Its earliest cadres included defectors from the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda. Islamic State emissaries arriving from Iraq and Syria met local commanders, particularly Pakistani militants seeking a new organisational home after internal divisions, military operations and leadership disputes weakened the TTP. The “Khorasan” label gave these groups a larger ideological horizon. It transformed local insurgents into soldiers of a supposedly global caliphate extending across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia. But beneath the grand historical language remained a familiar infrastructure: Pakistani militant networks, cross-border sanctuaries, madrassa recruitment, smuggling routes and intelligence games developed over decades. Pakistan has always attempted to present ISKP as a foreign infection entering from Afghanistan. This is convenient, but historically false.The organisation did not arrive in Pakistan from another planet. It emerged in part from the same jihadist ecosystem that the Pakistani state had cultivated, tolerated or selectively fought since the Afghan war of the 1980s. The TTP, sectarian groups, anti-Shia organisations, Kashmir-focused organisations and Afghan Taliban networks were never perfectly separated entities. Their members migrated between organisations, adopted new flags, changed commanders and repackaged themselves according to opportunity. ISKP was one of the products of this fluidity. Pakistan’s security establishment may not control ISKP as an organisation. The group has attacked Pakistani institutions, killed soldiers, targeted politicians and denounced the state as apostate. But Islamabad’s long practice of distinguishing between useful and hostile jihadists created the environment in which organisations such as ISKP could recruit, reorganise and survive. A state cannot construct an entire strategic policy around armed religious proxies and then convincingly claim surprise when militants begin changing allegiance. The transformation became impossible to ignore after the March 2024 attack on Crocus City Hall near Moscow. Four Tajik gunmen killed around 150 people and injured hundreds more. ISKP claimed responsibility and Islamic State’s central leadership celebrated the massacre as a revival of global jihadist power. The attack demonstrated that ISKP had moved beyond the model of a regional insurgency conducting bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was now capable of recruiting Central Asian operatives, exploiting migrant communities and organising attacks thousands of kilometres from its territorial base. For European and Russian security agencies, Crocus was a warning. For Pakistan, it should have been an indictment. The networks that now stretch into Europe are connected to an operational culture that developed across the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands. ISKP’s multilingual propaganda, recruitment among Central Asians and use of decentralised cells are new in scale, but not in method. Pakistan’s jihadist landscape has long depended on compartmentalised organisations linked through facilitators, financiers, preachers, safe houses and logistical intermediaries. The state often understood these networks perfectly when it wished to use them. It became remarkably blind when asked to dismantle them. The Pakistani angle has become particularly important in Balochistan. ISKP has expanded its presence there by targeting Shia communities, Sufis, political gatherings, Baloch nationalists and religious minorities. Its hostility towards secular Baloch movements overlaps conveniently with the interests of the Pakistani security establishment, which has spent years attempting to weaken Baloch nationalism through religious militancy and state-protected armed groups. This does not prove that every ISKP operation in Balochistan is directed by Pakistani intelligence. The organisation possesses its own ideological agenda and regards the Pakistani state itself as illegitimate. But the convergence of targets deserves scrutiny. Baloch nationalist groups, the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, the Balochistan National Party and minority communities have all faced threats from jihadist organisations operating in a province saturated with military checkpoints and intelligence installations. Militants somehow maintain training facilities, weapons, communications and movement in areas where peaceful activists can barely organise a demonstration without being detained. Pakistan explains this contradiction by invoking state weakness. Yet its weakness is curiously selective. The security establishment can disappear students, track journalists, monitor political organisers and dismantle protest camps. It is less successful when confronting sectarian and jihadist groups whose activities undermine Baloch nationalism. This is why allegations concerning figures such as Shafiq Mengal and the use of pro-state militias as intermediaries between the security establishment and extremist networks cannot simply be dismissed as separatist propaganda. Mengal has long been accused of leading death squads, operating private detention and torture facilities and participating in the counterinsurgency architecture built by the state in Khuzdar. More recent allegations describe him as an organiser or facilitator of ISKP networks in Balochistan. These claims remain difficult to verify independently, precisely because Pakistan permits no transparent investigation into its proxy structures. But the wider pattern is familiar. When secular ethnic resistance threatens the state, Pakistan turns to religious militancy. It did so against Pashtun nationalists. It did so in Afghanistan. It did so in Kashmir. In Balochistan, extremist groups have repeatedly been allowed to expand in environments where the army exercises overwhelming power. The result is not control but proliferation. The Europol operation also reveals how financial and logistical networks can sustain IS affiliates without every participant belonging directly to ISKP. The investigation into a Chechen-led network in Europe uncovered terrorism financing, cryptocurrency laundering and facilitation structures supporting Islamic State activities. Even where direct organisational links to ISKP cannot be established, these networks form part of the same transnational ecosystem. Money raised in Europe can move through intermediaries. Recruits can travel through third countries. Propaganda produced in Afghanistan or Pakistan can reach Central Asian communities in Moscow, Brussels or Berlin. Instructions can be transmitted without a formal chain of command. ISKP’s greatest strength is therefore not territorial control. It is connectivity. Pakistan remains central to that connectivity because of geography and history. It borders Afghanistan, Iran, India and the Arabian Sea. It possesses long-established smuggling and hawala networks. Millions of Afghan refugees and migrants have moved through the country. Jihadist organisations have enjoyed decades of access to recruitment structures, religious seminaries and political patronage. Most importantly, Pakistan has never fully dismantled the distinction between jihadists who threaten the state and jihadists who can be used by it. This ambiguity now carries international consequences. An organisation born partly from Pakistani militant defections can recruit Tajiks, finance cells in Europe and strike Russia. A local jihadist ecosystem has become a global security problem. Islamabad will continue to present itself as a victim and indispensable counterterrorism partner. It will point to soldiers killed by ISKP and operations conducted against its cells. These sacrifices are real. But victimhood does not erase responsibility. Pakistan’s security establishment helped create the strategic culture from which ISKP emerged: one in which armed religious groups are cultivated, fragmented, renamed and redirected rather than eliminated. Europol is now mapping the routes of a threat that stretches from Central Asia to Western Europe and the United States. Those routes may pass through airports, encrypted platforms and cryptocurrency exchanges. But trace them far enough back and they lead once again to the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands—and to a state that has spent forty years believing it could manage jihad without eventually exporting the consequences.