This report provides practitioners and scholars with an accessible guide to Islamic State Khurasan Province’s (ISKP) Voice of Khurasan magazine. Covering forty-six issues, it explores the strategic and historical context for the magazine’s emergence and evolution, broadly identifies thematic and motivational patterns across its content, and draws out research and policy lessons from those findings. This study argues that Voice of Khurasan is characterised by thematically and stylistically diverse content, responsive to shifting historical and strategic conditions, yet built on a consistent core narrative that frames the Islamic State as singularly capable of defending the ummah and reversing its crises through perpetual war. A persistent feature of that core narrative is that the ummah’s crisis is so acute that an intra-jihadi civil war is necessary to purify Islam’s ranks with sectarian violence lauded as a genocidal tool that must be wielded to help collapse a global architecture of enemies coalesced by their “cascading apostasy.” Designed specifically for English-speaking audiences, especially South and Central Asian diasporas in the West, Voice of Khurasan is unequivocal in its incitement to violence and its efforts to educate the next generation of media jihad operatives.
This report is organised into three parts. Part I outlines the historical and strategic context for Voice of Khurasan’s emergence and evolution from January 2022 to the end of 2025. Part II features a quick reference guide to forty-six issues of the publication with overarching analyses of annual trends in narrative, thematic, and editorial approaches. Finally, Part III identifies the key findings and lessons to be drawn from this study, especially concerning the dominant motivational levers deployed in Voice of Khurasan’s contents and the advice its editors offer to the next generation of media jihadists.
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