Islamic State, a global terror group, has started recruiting poor Indian youths under the garb of offering them lucrative jobs apparently from Iran and using fabricated appointment documents to give the entire operation a cover of genuineness, say security agency officials.
“Such cases have been seen in at least 14 states,” said an official, adding the ISIS route for taking the youths starts at Porbandar port in India from where they are taken to Iran before being sent to Afghanistan.
Apart from terror recruits, ISIS operations in some pockets in the country have spread to such an extent that a module had self-declared the village of Padgha in rural Thane as a “liberated zone” and as “Al Sham”, according to investigators. The ISIS has managed to set up its base in 14 states including Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Gujarat, UP, Jharkhand, Goa, Bihar, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
The Coimbatore blast, the cooker blast in Karnataka and attempts to send five youths from Madhya Pradesh to Afghanistan are part of activities of these ISIS modules.
Investigations have revealed that ISIS operatives are using the social media to target youths from poor families and force them to convert to Islam. The youths are trained in use of weapons and prepared to take up terror full time.
The NIA had arrested ISIS operative Ubaid Nasir Mir and four others in July 2023 from Gujarat. All the five were linked to ISKP module. Mohammad Sharif, an accused in the Karnataka cooker blast, Jabalpur module’s leader Mansoor Ali, Pune module’s Imran alias Matka are some of the ISIS operatives arrested during raids by the agency.
Officials said the ISIS is looking to disturb the communal harmony and secular fabric of the country. To foil the designs of the terror group, the NIA conducted raids at 44 locations recently and arrested 15 suspects.
NIA teams swooped down on locations in Padgha-Borivali, Thane, Mira Road and Pune in Maharashtra, and Bengaluru in Karnataka and apprehended the 15 accused for promoting terror and terror related acts and activities of the proscribed organisation.
Huge amounts of unaccounted cash, firearms, sharp edged weapons, incriminating documents, smartphones and other digital devices were seized during the raids, conducted as part of NIA’s ongoing efforts to disrupt and demolish the attempts of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to carry out violent acts of terror and take innocent lives.
The accused, operating on the directions of their foreign handlers, had been actively involved in various terrorist activities, including fabrication of IEDs, for furthering the violent and destructive agenda of the ISIS, as per NIA investigations.
NIA investigations have further revealed that the accused, all members of ISIS Maharashtra module, were operating from PadghaBorivali, where they had hatched the conspiracy to spread terror and carry out acts of violence across India. Pursuing the path of violent Jihad, Khilafat, ISIS etc., the accused had aimed to disturb the peace and communal harmony of the country and to wage a war against the Government of India.
Saqib Nachan, the main accused and the leader and head of the ISIS module, was also administering the “bayath” (oath of allegiance to the Khalifa of ISIS) to the persons joining the proscribed organisation.