ISIS recruiters use online forums to attract youth

ISIS recruiters use various tactics to lure youngsters from India apart from showering them with ISIS propaganda materials.

Recruiter Shafi Armar from Bhatkal used to personally message each Indian who liked the propaganda Facebook page or followed the propaganda Twitter handle. Another technique is to introduce other men and women from various part of the world interested in ISIS through groups and channels created on the messeging app Telegram.

The group members usually debate on the relevance of Khalifa (one leader for the entire Muslim world), loopholes in a democratic system, the idea of Jihad and son on. By participating in these debates, youngsters sometimes get convinced that ISIS can build a better world and is their “ticket to heaven”.

This pattern has been revealed in various chargesheets related to IS cases filed by the NIA.

In the remand report submitted at a local court in Hyderabad, National Investigation Agency officials had stated that the five men who were arrested for planning terror attacks, had been receiving “directions from ISIS to plan and carry out violent terror attacks’. In earlier cases too, few youngsters from Hyderabad had been brainwashed by ISIS agents from abroad.

Most ISIS sympathisers, who came under the radar of intelligence agencies, were members of multiple Telegram groups created and run by ISIS recruiters. The chargesheet against Gulbarga native, Mohammed Sirajuddin, who was nabbed by the NIA recently, said he was part of more than five such groups on Telegram.

After being brainwashed in these groups, Sirajuddin went ahead and created a few such groups himself in Telegram including “Diary of Mujahid” and invited others to join, revealed the NIA chargesheet.

According to intelligence officials, several hundred narratives, photographs and videos of IS operatives from Syrian battlefields have been circulated among Indian sympathisers to motivate them. Motivational speeches by IS fighters have also been circulated.

The online recruiters also tell the prospective recruits to be careful and use proxy servers and VPN so that enforcement agencies cannot track their online activities, the chargesheet reveals.

Other suspects still at large: NIA National Investigation Agency prosecutors, while arguing for the custody of the five arrested ISIS men at a local court, said that they needed to interrogate the suspects in order to unearth sleeper cells and other members of the terror module who were still at large.

In its application for their custody, NIA said that the accused — Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani alias Ibbu, Habeeb Mohammed alias Sir, Mohammed Ilyas Yazdani, Abdullah Bin Ahmed Al Amoodi and Muzaffar Hussain Rizwan — needed to be taken to Maharashtra and Rajasthan, and it also wanted to question them on the possibility of recovering more explosives.

Following the custody petition and the argument, The fourth additional metropolitan sessions judge K. Rajkumar granted 12 days’ custody of the five remanded suspects to NIA and directed that the accused be produced before the court on July 12. The judge also put conditions not to follow third-degree interrogation techniques and to allow the advocate of the accused to visit them. During the arguments for police custody, NIA said they also wanted to probe the source of funding for the activities of the accused and about their contacts. However, the defence counsel sought dismissal of the NIA petition, saying it was not maintainable.

NIA claimed the five were getting instructions from ISIS for planning and carrying out terror acts in India. Officials had recovered explosive materials, two semi-automatic pistols with ammunition, an air gun with telescopic sight and target practice boards from the accused.