New Delhi: Mohammad Sharifullah, an alleged Islamic State operative deported to the United States from Pakistan on 2 March this year, had been in the custody of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) since April last year, ThePrint has learnt.
After the ISI detained Mohammad Sharifullah, the agency used him in a long-running but ultimately unsuccessful intelligence operation to lure top Islamic State commanders involved in bombings in Kabul and Moscow, two Indian government sources familiar with the case have told ThePrint.
“The decision to end the operation and put him [Sharifullah] on trial seems based on changed political circumstances rather than closure of the case,” an Indian official said, adding that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in locating Sharifullah in Pakistan last year, leading to his capture by the ISI.
On Wednesday, after Sharifullah’s successful deportation to the US, Donald Trump thanked Pakistan for its cooperation in acting against a man who the US President described as the “top terrorist” involved in the 2021 bombing at Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also announced on Wednesday that Pakistani security forces captured Sharifullah.
Thirteen US military personnel and an estimated 170 civilians died in the Abbey Gate explosion and subsequent gunfire by American troops.
“This evil ISIS-K terrorist orchestrated the brutal murder of 13 heroic service members,” US Attorney General Pamela Bondi said Wednesday. “Under President Trump’s strong leadership on the world stage, this Department of Justice will ensure that terrorists like Mohammad Sharifullah have no safe haven, no second chances.” ISIS-K or ISIS-Khorasan is a branch of Islamic State operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Sharifullah’s capture, one of the Indian officials said, was a small part of a more extensive operation led by the CIA during the 2024 summer, targeting Islamic State commanders involved in a looming wave of suicide attacks across Europe.
One Washington DC-based government official said that among the operation’s outcomes was this week’s arrest of a Tajik illegal immigrant, Mansuri Manuchekhri, alleged to have raised tens of thousands of dollars for Islamic State attacks across the world.
A United Nations Security Council report analysing developments from mid-2024 to the end of December said that Pakistan arrested three more key figures behind the 2024 bombings in Iran’s Kerman and Moscow. They are Tajikistan national Abu Munzir, Uzbekistan national Kaka Yunes, and Afghanistan national Adil Panjsheri.
Islamabad has issued no word on when they would be put to trial or whether requests are pending for their extradition to the United States, Iran, Russia or several European countries, where plots were mounted last year.
Less than a ‘mastermind’?
A Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit has ascribed a somewhat lesser central role to Sharifullah than the “top terrorist” label used by Trump. Islamic State commanders, according to the affidavit, gave Sharifullah a SIM card and motorcycle, asking him to drive on a route leading up to Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) to see if there were checkpoints that could detect a suicide bomber.
“Later that same day,” the affidavit stated, “Sharifullah learned of the attack at HKIA described above and recognised the alleged bomber as an ISIS-K operative he had known while incarcerated.”
One of the Indian officials told ThePrint, “From long experience, we know there were almost certainly several individuals involved in reconnaissance operations of this kind. These operatives are usually fairly low down the chain of command and, carefully, insulated from the leadership so that their arrest does not compromise an operation.”
Two years ago, the then United States National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told the media that the Taliban had shot dead the mastermind of the 2021 bombing. “He was killed in a Taliban operation,” Kirby said, adding that it was another in a series of high-profile leadership losses the Islamic State suffered in 2023.
According to the pro-Taliban media outlet Al-Mersaad, the ISIS-K cadre shot dead two figures associated with the Abbey Gate bombing. Dr Hussain, a member of its suicide operations cell and central council in Afghanistan, was shot dead in the city of Herat on 5 April 2023. Four days later, another key ISIS-K operative, who used the name Abdullah Kabuli, was killed in Zaranj.
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The India connection
Abdul Rahman al-Logari, the terrorist who carried out the Abbey Gate suicide bombing, had spent several years in a Kabul prison after the Delhi Police arrested him in 2018 and deported him to Afghanistan.
The son of a well-known business family, Al-Logari, who was studying for an engineering degree at an institute in Noida and lived in an apartment in Lajpat Nagar, reached out to the ISIS-K online to stage a suicide attack in New Delhi.
Following a lead from the CIA, ThePrint reported that the Research and Analysis Wing in India was able to introduce an agent in the online communication circle of Al-Logari. The agent pretended to further the plot by sourcing explosive devices and recruiting personnel.
The New Delhi suicide-bombing plot, sources in the security establishment said, began to take shape in the summer of 2016, soon after the ISIS-K’s military ‘shura’ or council picked Aslam Faruqi to lead the organisation.
A 1977-born ethnic Pashtun from Bara in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Faruqi initially joined the Lashkar-e-Taiba and operated alongside the Taliban from 2007 to 2014 before leaving for Syria to join ISIS.
According to the scholar Antonio Giustozzi, Faruqi returned to Pakistan in 2016 to take over as the leader of the ISIS-K. The move was a “result of contacts with the Pakistani ISI, which hinted to ISIS-K the possibility of a trade-off—the appointment of a leader linked to the ISI and the cessation of attacks against Pakistani government targets in return for access to safe havens in Pakistan”, said Giustozzi.
Sharifullah allegedly joined the ISIS-K, the ISIS branch with its members spread across Afghanistan and Pakistan, in 2016.
Al-Logari was deported to Afghanistan days after his arrest but released after the Taliban took over the notorious Bagram prison. According to the FBI affidavit, Sharifullah later recognised a photograph of Al-Logari as among the men in the Bagram prison, where Pakistan was holding him.
The Moscow video
The FBI affidavit stated that the ISIS-K asked Sharifullah to send a how-to video on using assault rifles to the men who carried out the 22 March 2024 attack on the Crocus Theatre near Russia’s Moscow, killing at least 137 people. Sharifullah allegedly claimed to have identified two of the four men arrested by Russia’s Federal Security Service or FSB as among those who he had sent the video to.
There is no explanation in the affidavit about why the four ethnic Tajik men arrested for the 2014 attack—Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev, Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, Shamsidin Fariduni and Muhammadsobir Fayzov—needed an instructional video in the first place, considering several are freely available online.
An Indian official said that following digital evidence related to the attack, the FBI was able to locate Sharifullah and secured the ISI’s help to make him cross the Afghanistan-Balochistan border, where he was caught.
The FBI also stated that Sharifuddin issued an exaggerated press release on behalf of the ISIS-K, claiming that nearly 15 security guards died in a 2016bombing outside the Embassy of Canada in Kabul.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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