RISE OF IDEOLOGICAL JIHADIS

The Rise of Ideological Jihadists And why India should be really worried Tufail Ahmad is a former journalist with the BBC Urdu Service and Director of South Asia Studies Project at the Middle East Media Research Institute, Washington DC Almost all terror attacks in Jammu & Kashmir and elsewhere in India could be attributed to the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, as well as to major Pakistan-based terror organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad. Wait, that is no longer the case. India is now witnessing the rise of a new generation of jihadists, who identify themselves with groups based in the Middle East. They are motivated by the ideology of jihad— both through social media networks as well as by local recruiters—and are not sponsored by Pakistan. As per intelligence estimates that appeared in the media in July, up to 80 Indian Muslim youths are reportedly fighting alongside jihadists in Iraq and Syria. The argument that Indian Muslims are not part of Osama bin Laden’s global jihad now stands invalidated by the turn of events. In the summer of 2013, a new anti-India group began coming to the fore: Ansar ut-Tawheed Fi Bilad Al-Hind (Supporters of the Islamic Monotheism in India). It released a number of videos in which nearly a dozen youths from Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh were shown training somewhere in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. On 18 July this year, the 20th of the fasting month of Ramadan, a jihadi account on Twitter released a photograph of Anwer Bhatkal, a relative of Indian Mujahideen co-founder Riyaz Bhatkal, announcing his death while fighting in Afghanistan. These Muslim men are being recruited both internally in India and from abroad. As reported by journalist Praveen Swami, four Muslim youths from the suburbs of Mumbai— Arif Majeed, Fahad Sheikh, Shaheen Tanki and Aman Tandel— flew on May 23 for Baghdad as part of a group of 22 Shia pilgrims and joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the terror group headed by jihadist commander Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. A few youths from Tamil Nadu who were based in Singapore were recruited by jihadists and are now fighting in Syria, notably Fakkurudeen, who took his wife and three children to the jihadist battlefield. In addition to the ideological jihadists who may or may not be recruited by Pakistan- based groups, the arrest in April—along with the Chennai train blasts in May—of Sri Lankan national Shakir aka Zakir Hussein by Chennai police revealed transnational terror links involving Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan and Malaysia to target Israeli and US consulates in Bangalore and Chennai, hatched by Pakistan’s ISI and involving a Pakistani diplomat in Colombo. On 29 June, an audio statement was issued by Al-Baghdadi. He declared himself as the Caliph, or head of the Islamic State, and demanded bai’yah (an oath of fealty) from all Muslims. Among the jihadists, the position of Caliph, known formally as Emir- ul-Momineen (Leader of the Faithful Muslims), was until now held only by Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader from Afghanistan. Al-Baghdadi’s ISIS has released a global map where it aims to enforce the Islamicsharia rule. The map includes the land of Khorasan, which covers Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. +++ THE JIHADIST THREAT TO INDIA IS REAL Al-Baghdadi is considered a terrorist by all good-intentioned people in the West and the East, including by a large number of Islamic clerics across the world—except by Indian cleric Maulana Salman Al-Husaini Nadwi. In early July, Nadwi, an Islamic scholar at the Nadwatul Ulama seminary of Lucknow, wrote an open letter greeting him on his assuming the role of Caliph. In the letter sent via messaging service WhatsApp and in later statements in Hindi and Urdu, Nadwi referred to Al-Baghdadi as Emir-ul-Momineen and prayed—‘May Allah protect you’, spoke of ‘good news of victories’ in Iraq, urged jihadist organisations in Syria to sink their differences and forge unity, and advocated that Muslims ‘abide by’ the Emir-ul- Momineen ‘if he follows Allah’s sharia’. Nadwi’s message is certain to motivate hundreds of Indian Muslim youths on the path of global jihad, especially because the cleric heads an organisation of Muslim youth called Jamiat- u-Shabab-il-Islam, which must now be placed on the watch of Indian intelligence agencies. An especially worrisome fact is that Nadwi wrote another letter to Saudi Arabia requesting the Saudis to train five lakh Sunni Muslim youth from India to fight against Shia militias in Iraq, according to the media reports emerging in July. Anjuman-e-Haideri, a Delhi-based organisation of Shia Muslims, placed advertisements in Urdu newspapers calling on volunteers to defend holy shrines in Iraq. Ali Mirza of Anjuman-e-Haideri said his group will register one million volunteers. One lakh Shias registered; of them, 6,000 volunteers have applied for Iraqi visas. The volunteers say their mission is humanitarian. Zeeshan Haider, a youth, described his trip as “a religious duty”. Haji Mirza Qasim Raza, a volunteer, said: “There is nothing that I will not do to protect Karbala... including laying down my life.” Jahan Ara, a widow with failing eyesight, said: “There’s no better way to spend one’s last days”. 25 per cent of the volunteers are women. Iran-backed Shia cleric Kalb-e-Jawwad supported women’s participation in battlefields, arguing: “There are misconceptions about Islam being very limiting for women”. The risk is that Indian Shias visiting Iraq could be recruited by Iran-backed Shia militias. For Shia nurses, doctors and others, the best deed is to help the sick in India; or, they should go as part of Red Cross, not led by sectarian group like Anjuman-e-Haideri. Social media reports and images indicate that some public demonstrations in favour of the Al-Baghdadi-led ISIS took place in the states of Tamil Nadu and Jammu & Kashmir. According to one report, nearly two dozen Muslim youths posed for a picture wearing ISIS T-shirts in front of the ‘Periya Pallivasal’ (Big Mosque) in Ramanathapuram district of Tamil Nadu, from where some youths have already gone to fight in Syria. Reports from Jammu & Kashmir reveal that masked Kashmiri youths held at least two public demonstrations carrying ISIS flags in Srinagar: the first was at the Jamia Masjid on 11 July and a second was on the day of Eid-ul-Fitr, 29 July. There were reports in the Indian media that Muslim youths from Kerala could be headed to join groups like ISIS. In recent years, Al-Qaeda has carried out a considerable media campaign to recruit youth from India. In June 2013, Al-Qaeda had released a video—titled “Why is there no storm in your river?”—in which militant cleric Maulana Asim Umar expressed exasperation that while Muslim youth from all over the world were fighting in Syria and elsewhere, Indian Muslims were not. Last June, Al-Qaeda released another video devoted to the Kashmir issue, in which Asim Umar exhorted: “Who took away Kalashnikovs from the hands of my Kashmiri Muslims and handed them stones and pieces of soil?” +++ NOT ALL TERRORISTS ARE JIHADISTS OR ISLAMISTS India now needs to worry about the threat from ideological jihadists. There are clear indications that the ISIS is attracting jihadists from Pakistan and India. Their guiding philosophy is rooted in Ghazwa-e-Hind (the Battle of India), a statement in which Prophet Muhammad prophesied that two groups from the Ummah will be saved from the fire of Hell—one group will rise from India and march on to join the forces of the second group led by Jesus who will be reborn in the present-day Israel to establish the global Islamic rule. The Ghazwa-e-Hind prophecy is widely quoted in the literature and videos of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda’s Pakistani commanders as well as by mainstream Pakistani jihadist ideologues such as Zaid Hamid, Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and Jaish-e- Muhammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar. Now, India is seeing the emergence of this class of jihadists who ideologically connect with those in Iraq and Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia