[Amarnath Amarasingam, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said the Sri Lankan attacks are an example of a growing trend where “local groups with local grievances” form ties with international terrorist groups in a mutually beneficial arrangement. The local group potentially gets training, funding and a link to an attention-grabbing “brand” like the Islamic State. Meanwhile, the Islamic State gets to demonstrate its relevance despite its loss of physical territory.]
By
Joanna Slater and Pamela Constable
NEW
DELHI — It was one of the last places anyone expected
the Islamic State to strike.
Just weeks after its decisive defeat in
Syria, the radical group claimed responsibility for coordinated attacks more
than 3,000 miles away in Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean.
The attacks, which killed more than 250
people, were notable both for their brutality and their location. That’s
because South Asia has proved relatively resistant to the brand of extremist
violence peddled by the Islamic State, with a few exceptions.
Among those is Afghanistan, home to the only
official Islamic State affiliate in the region. And a disproportionate number
of people from the tiny archipelago of the Maldives left to fight for the group
in Iraq and Syria.
India, meanwhile, has the second-largest
population of Muslims in the world, but experts say that around 100 citizens
are believed to have traveled to the self-declared caliphate, fewer than the
number of such recruits from the Netherlands. The estimates for the number of
people from Pakistan and Bangladesh, both Muslim-majority nations, who went to
join the Islamic State are lower than the figure for Germany.
But in the wake of the suicide bombings in
Sri Lanka, governments throughout the region are reviewing their assessment of
the threat posed by the Islamic State. In India, authorities have carried out
several raids and arrested alleged Islamic State sympathizers in the southern
states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
Here’s a look at the threat around the
region.
Sri
Lanka
According to the Sri Lankan government, at
least 32 of its citizens traveled to join the Islamic State when it controlled
a swath of territory in Syria and Iraq. Some returned home, according to Shiral
Lakthilaka, an adviser to Sri Lanka’s president, and those returnees helped
“plant the seeds” of the Easter Sunday bombings, he said, without providing
further details.
Officials say all perpetrators of the attacks
were Sri Lankan, and investigators are working to determine whether they
received direct assistance — in terms of training or funding — from the Islamic
State. Authorities are also probing whether any of the bombers returned from
Syria or Iraq and whether they traveled to India.
Amarnath Amarasingam, a senior research
fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said the Sri Lankan attacks are
an example of a growing trend where “local groups with local grievances” form
ties with international terrorist groups in a mutually beneficial arrangement.
The local group potentially gets training, funding and a link to an
attention-grabbing “brand” like the Islamic State. Meanwhile, the Islamic State
gets to demonstrate its relevance despite its loss of physical territory.
India
India is home to about 200 million Muslims,
but the Islamic State has failed to make significant inroads in the country,
even in the restive Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir. Since 2014,
there have been about 180 cases involving the group’s sympathizers, said Kabir
Taneja, a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi who has
written extensively about the Islamic State. “From a grand perspective, it’s
nothing,” he said. “You have to see this as a complete refusal of the Indian
Muslim community to fall for this nonsense.”
A spokesman for India’s National
Investigation Agency, which investigates terrorism-related cases, declined to
comment on the threat posed by the Islamic State in the country. The only
attack linked to militants inspired by the group came in 2017, when a crude
bomb exploded on a train in the state of Madhya Pradesh, injuring at least 10
people.
Yet there are regions where the Islamic State
has managed to draw adherents, including in the northern part of Kerala. The
state has the highest literacy rates and development indicators in the country,
as well as deep historical ties to the Middle East through migration and trade.
In 2016, a group of five families left Kerala hoping to reach Islamic State
territory via Afghanistan.
In the disputed region of Kashmir, where
existing Islamist militant groups are fighting Indian rule, the Islamic State
has a negligible presence, authorities say. “There are some boys over there who
jump up every so often and wave [an ISIS] flag,” said Ajai Sahni, a terrorism
expert and executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New
Delhi. “That’s just an effort to get attention.”
Maldives
Best
known for its pristine beaches and turquoise seas, the island nation of
Maldives is one spot in South Asia where Islamic State recruitment tactics have
had notable success. Experts believe about 200 Maldivians left to join the
militant group, one of the highest per capita rates in the world. In recent
years, the predominantly Muslim nation has experienced an influx of investment
from Saudi Arabia and the growing influence of a puritanical strain of Islam.
The Maldivian capital, Male, is one of the most densely populated cities on
earth and is home to dozens of criminal gangs.
While the Islamic State has urged its
adherents to strike the places where they are living, there have not been
attacks linked to the group in Maldives to date. There have, however, been
arrests of people who were reportedly inspired by the group’s ideology and
conspired to carry out violence. Taneja suggested that in Maldives, the main
appeal of the Islamic State was as an actual place for disaffected young men to
go. “They were most interested in joining the caliphate,” he said. “Once that
geography was taken away, that interest also watered down a bit.”
Bangladesh
In recent years, Bangladesh has struggled
with attacks linked to Islamist militant groups, including the Islamic State.
The most infamous was the attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery in 2016 in an
upscale area of the capital, Dhaka. Twenty-two hostages were killed, most of
them foreigners.
Bangladesh maintains that the Islamic State
has no presence in the country, but other governments disagree. The United
States says that a faction of the Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) serves
as the local branch of the Islamic State. The country has designated the group
a terrorist organization.
“They talk like ISIS and behave like ISIS,”
said Tasneem Khalil, a Bangladeshi journalist who lives in Sweden and tracks
militant groups. Meanwhile, Islamic State propaganda channels targeting Bengali
speakers — operating primarily on the messaging app Telegram — have become
active again after a lull last year, he said. “Obviously they are regrouping
and trying to excite their base.”
Mufti Mahmud Khan, a spokesman for
Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion, a counterterrorism unit, said that local
extremists “follow the ideology of international militant groups, but that does
not mean they are run by their chain of command.” Such groups are “now much
weaker than the past.”
Khan said that police are investigating the
Islamic State’s claim of responsibility for an improvised bomb that injured
three on April 29 in Dhaka. But he also urged caution. “The cyber world is now
very wide,” he said. “Anyone can claim anything.”
Afghanistan
The Islamic State has been active in eastern
Afghanistan, along the border with Pakistan, for the past five years, and it
has been the main target of a joint U.S.-Afghan counterterrorism campaign
there. Some fighters are former members of the Taliban and an associated group,
the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. The regional affiliate is known as
ISIS-Khorasan.
The group’s fighters have terrorized villages
and towns in border districts of Nangahar province, beheaded local elders, and
forced thousands of people to flee to the provincial capital. They have had
complicated relations with the Taliban, alternately competing and collaborating
with them. In the past year, U.S. and Afghan officials claim to have driven
Islamic State forces largely from the area, and they have been much less
active.
A second, separate focus of Islamic State
activity in Afghanistan has been to carry out suicide bombings and violent
attacks in Kabul and other cities, especially targeting the Afghan Shiite
community, which is also composed of minority ethnic Hazaras. The Islamic
State, a Sunni radical group, views Shiites as apostates.
In the past five years, the Islamic State has
claimed deadly bombings and shootings at a number of Shiite mosques and
shrines. It has also attacked schools, gymnasiums, hospitals, public gatherings
and voter registration centers. The worst to date was a bombing in July 2016
that targeted a peaceful protest by young Hazaras in Kabul. The blast killed 85
people and wounded 400.
Pakistan
The
risk posed by Islamic State in Pakistan is somewhat murkier, and most analysts
see its activity there as an outgrowth of its Afghan affiliate. The group has
claimed responsibility for deadly attacks in the restive Balochistan province,
including one in April at a fruit and vegetable market in the city of Quetta
that killed 21 people. However, experts say that the group appears to be
drawing from an existing pool of militants who have chosen to switch
allegiances.
For instance, Hafiz Saeed Khan, a veteran
commander of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan who was killed in 2016, pledged
loyalty to the leader of the Islamic State in 2014 and brought with him a
number of prominent fighters. In Pakistan, adherents of the Islamic State
“continue to do the exact same thing they were doing, but now with a brand-new
identity,” said Sahni, the terrorism expert.
Constable reported from Kabul. Azad Majumder
in Dhaka, Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad and Niha Masih in New Delhi contributed to
this report.
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