Washington DC: Five thousand kilometres from home, the traveller from Kerala exulted in his discovery: “Yummy Indian pakodas, chicken cutlets, jilabees (sic) and tamarind juice,” he recorded in his blog, “Looking for a perfect Indian fish curry.”
The man visited markets packed with fresh produce, checked out local clothing stores, explored ancient monuments, visited the region’s famous pomegranate field and asked if anyone could suggest where he could pick fresh local cherries.
Then, some time in 2017, this perfect holiday came to an end: Abu Thahir, a one-time resident of the village of Puthupariyaram in Kerala, was obliterated in an air-strike near Aleppo, said to have been carried out by a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drone.
Late on Tuesday, the jihadist organisation that Abu Thahrir served, issued a glowing tribute to the victory of Haya’at Tahrir Al-Sham’s victory in Syria—the latest in a line of similar statements from al-Qaeda’s other regional wings.
“At the command of Allah the most magnificent,” the al-Qaeda statement reads, “the brutal Nusairi regime that ruled the land for a solid half of a century was shattered to pieces by the sacrifices of the Mujahideen of Islam.” The word ‘Nusairi’ is a derogatory term for the Alawi community, which practices a heterodox form of Islam, and to which former president Bashar al-Assad belonged.
Even as millions of Syrians around the world are celebrating the fall of Assad’s brutal regime, intelligence services in India are worried about what it could mean for them. Tahrir Al-Sham insists it is opposed to transnational terrorism, but video has surfaced showing Pakistani, Uzbek and Chechen fighters among its ranks.
“The mujahideen in Syria are now responsible for the formation, establishment and protection of an Islamic society whose every child, youth or elder is a protector and guard of the religion of Islam,” the statement reads. “They are now responsible for raising a mujahid [religious warrior] generation who shall defend the ummah [Muslim nation] and liberate the sanctuaries of Islam.”
“From our perspective,” an Indian intelligence officer who has served in Turkey told ThePrint, “the big danger is that the rise of Tahrir al-Sham will revive the ideas of violent jihad, which seemed to have been extinguished by the fall of the Islamic State and other jihadists groups after 2018.”
“Even if Tahrir al-Sham focusses on building a state, it could end up providing sanctuary to jihadists from around the world.”
Indians in the caliphate
Like Abu Thahrir, a large number of Indian nationals, as well as hundreds of citizens of Maldives, Pakistan and Bangladesh, joined the Islamic State, as well as the al-Nusra Front, as al-Qaeda in Syria was called. Forty Indian nations— overwhelmingly members of the diaspora in the Middle East, and around half of them children or women—are still thought to be held in al-Shadadi and other Kurdish-run camps like Ghweiran and al-Hawl, as well as jails in Turkey and Libya.
Among the first jihadists to arrive in Syria were members of the Indian Mujahideen (IM) network, responsible for an urban terrorism campaign that raged across India from 2005 to 2008. Following restrictions placed on their activities in Pakistan, several members of the Indian Mujahideen joined al-Nusra and the Islamic State.
In an official Islamic State video released in 2016, several IM members announced their intention to return home and avenge the demolition of the Babri Masjid, as well as killings of Muslims in communal riots. “To those in the Indian state who wish to understand our actions,” one unidentified jihadist said in the video, “I say you have only three options: To accept Islam, to pay jizya [religious tax], or to prepare to be slaughtered.”
These Indian jihadists were often recruited while living and working in the Middle-East. For example, Ranchi-born electronics engineer Syed Muhammad Arshiyan Haider—now imprisoned in Turkey, after he refused to be deported to India at the end of his prison sentence—was a graduate of the Aligarh Muslim University, and worked in a prestigious company in Dammam, Saudi Arabia.
Linked to a network run by Bangladeshi-origin, Glamorgan-trained computer engineer Siful Haque Sujan and Pakistani national Sajid Babar, Haider is believed to have helped design combat drones for the Islamic State. The network sourced electronic components for the drones through a network of front-companies run by Syrian-born Ibrahim Hag Gneid—one of several foreign jihadists given Turkish citizenship under opaque circumstances.
Adil Fayaz Wada, the son of an affluent Srinagar contractor and supermarket chain owner, joined the Islamic State soon after completing an MBA in Brisbane. Wada is believed to have been recruited to join the Islamic State by the Australian Islamist Hamdi al-Qudsi, who was later sentenced to eight years in prison for his activities.
Entire families migrated to jihadist-held territories in Syria. The survivors include Thayyib Sheikh Meeran, a Canadian permanent resident whose family comes from Vellore in Tamil Nadu, who was working for Hewlett-Packard when he left for the caliphate with his family in 2015. Shoaib Shafiq Anwar left an engineering position at a university in Saudi Arabia to join the Islamic State, along with his wife Soufia Muqeet. Both are now believed to be in prison in Kurdish-held Syria.
Post-jihadist state?
Late in the summer of 2016, jihadist leader Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a—better known by the pseudonym Abu Mohammad al-Julan—disbanded al-Nusra, as it disintegrated under attack from Syria and its allies Iran and Russia. Turkey, together with Qatar, helped al-Shar’a build a mini-state in the northern province of Idlib.
Tahrir al-Sham now casts itself as a conservative religious group, committed to building an Islam-centred order in Syria. Even though he has cooperated with Turkish and United States counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, some fear elements in its ranks still retain ties to those groups. Tahrir al-Shams, notably, celebrated the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a group which continues to have close ties to al-Qaeda.
At the same time, al-Qaeda itself has closely mirrored Tahrir al-Shams’ evolution, devolving into decentralised networks embedded inside locally-focussed organisations like the Taliban, rather than the transnational jihadist vanguard envisaged by Osama Bin Laden.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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