The Foreign Policy and Enemy Perception of the Islamic State Khorasan Province: An Assessment of Voice of Khurasan and Sawt al-Khurasan.

The international attention on the Islamic State Khorasan Province has
increased since the Taliban takeover in 2021. International assessments emphasise its growing international threat, potentially targeting Western countries. The Khorasan branch of the Islamic State has intensified its propaganda efforts to a level comparable to the Islamic State central at its peak, and is the only branch producing magazines in English since the decline of ISIS. This study examines the attitudes towards other nations and enemy perceptions expressed in the English language Voice of Khurasan and Arabic Sawt al-Khurasan, published between January 2022 and June 2023. We focus on attitudes communicated by Islamic State Khorasan Province toward Western and non-Western nations, as well as how these attitudes differ between the Arabic and English magazines. Utilising a mixed-methods approach, the study combines quantitative machine learning tools, BERTopic and sentiment analysis, and qualitative categorisation frameworks. The primary data consists of 26 magazine issues processed through Optical Character Recognition and machine translation tools. The analysis shows that, while foreign policy (i.e. enemy perception) represents the most significant theme in both magazines, Sawt al Khurasan contains more explicit threats and strategic advice targeting regional actors, while Voice of Khurasan remains primarily ideologically critical towards both Western and regional targets. These results suggest that ISKP’s propaganda reflects a predominantly regional focus, challenging the narrative of an immediate global threat posed to Western countries. The study underscores the need for deeper attention to ISKP’s regional ambitions and its evolving media strategies.