KABUL, Afghanistan — At least 17 people were killed on Wednesday when militants said to be members of the Islamic State attacked a checkpoint on the Tajikistan-Uzbekistan border, the Tajik authorities said.

The attack points to the resilience of the Islamic State and its longstanding aim to spread further into Central Asia from its enclave in Afghanistan. It comes almost two weeks after the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed during an American military operation in northwestern Syria. Western officials had warned that Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death was likely to lead to retaliatory attacks.

Fifteen assailants were killed in the gun battle in Tajikistan, as were a Tajik border guard and an employee of the country’s Interior Ministry. Five militants were captured, the ministry said in a statement.

The Islamic State has not taken responsibility for the clash, which occurred around 50 miles southwest of the capital, Dushanbe, but the Interior Ministry said that Tajik officials had learned of the group’s role during “the investigation and interrogation” of the captured fighters.

“These attackers are probably our own citizens,” said Umarjon Emomali, a spokesman for the Tajikistan Interior Ministry.

The militants crossed into Tajikistan over the weekend from Kunduz Province, in northern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said. The fighters passed through the Qala-e-Zal district, an area where the border is porous because it is almost entirely controlled by the Taliban, said Mohammad Nabi Gochli, the local police commander there.

“They didn’t raise their flags because they are scared of the Taliban,” Mr. Gochli said on Wednesday.

Mr. Gochli said that he had learned that Islamic State fighters had arrived in his district roughly two weeks ago, and that they had inhabited a cluster of villages along the Amu Darya, a river that runs almost parallel to the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border.

The governor of Qala-e-Zal, Ahmad Fahim Qarluq, said on Wednesday that an Islamic State commander had arrived in the district about a month ago from the southeastern province of Nangarhar and had been recruiting fighters.

As told by Mr. Qarluq and Mr. Gochli, the fighters’ spreading from southeastern Afghanistan and eventually into Tajikistan highlights what could be described as the slow but steady growth of the Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan, known as Islamic State Khorasan.

Tajikistan, an impoverished former Soviet republic of nine million, fought Islamist insurgents in a civil war in the 1990s, and it has regularly been plagued by unrest since then. Hundreds of people from the country are believed to have joined the Islamic State.

In May, the group claimed responsibility for the deaths of more than 20 people during a riot in a Tajik prison east of Dushanbe, along with the release of prisoners affiliated with the Islamic State.

And in July 2018, four touring cyclists — two from the United States, one from the Netherlands and one from Switzerland — were run down and killed by a carload of men who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. American defense officials said the attack was inspired, and possibly even directed, by the Islamic State leadership in Afghanistan.

The group’s affiliate in Afghanistan established a foothold in Nangarhar Province in 2015, and it has slowly spread elsewhere in the country, including to Kabul, the capital.

Estimated to have between 2,500 and 3,000 fighters, many of whom are from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the group has established itself as an enduring threat in Afghanistan despite repeated American-backed military offensives and hundreds of airstrikes.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff reported from Kabul, and Najim Rahim from Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan.

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