In the second week of July in 2014, after attending a protest against Israel in the Old City, Abdullah Basith sat in his room and started browsing ISIS propaganda pages on Facebook and Twitter rigorou
In the second week of July in 2014, after attending a protest against Israel in the Old City, Abdullah Basith sat in his room and started browsing ISIS propaganda pages on Facebook and Twitter rigorously.
He was frustrated and angry, about his life, about Gaza and about Babri Masjid. Scrolling through the videos and posts for a few days, he came across an impressive profile of a person named Abu Aziz al-Andalusi, who claimed to be a sniper with ISIS in Idlib.
Inspired by the real time updates of ISIS he put up on the propaganda pages, Basith sent him a friend request. With long chats on Skype and Telegram in July last week, Andalusi, who accepted in two days, changed Basith’s outlook on life drastically.
Basith’s parents was never aware of his online activities, which would later land him in police custody twice for his efforts to join ISIS.
“Basith grew up in Medina, Saudi Arabia, along with his elder sister. His father Arif, who ran a small business in Medina, relocated to Nazeeb Nagar in Chandrayangutta with his family when Basith was 14,” said an officer from the special investigation team (SIT).
Growing up under the strict rules of his father, Basith had started hating his life. When he failed in 10 subjects in college, his father beat him up twice, leaving him more frustrated. The friendship with ISIS sympathisers online gave him a satisfaction that he could not achieve in real world.
“He was a different person online, confident and smart. Probably, he must have thought leaving home and joining ISIS would make him that person in real life,” said a close friend of Basith.
After chatting for several days, Andaluzi disappeared from social media, leaving Basith restless. In the next few days, Basith searched frantically on Facebook till he found a person named Abu Zakariya from Hatay, a Turkish province located on the Syria border. In the following days, Abu Zakaria had long chats with Basith and offered him help to get to Syria. As per the plan, Basith would take a flight from Delhi to Istanbul and then take the “jihadi superhighway” with the help of an ISIS associate.
Zakariya told him to leave his phone at home to lose police tails and at Istanbul he should buy a TurkCell SIM card for communication purposes.
“When he was trying for a Turkish visa, following a tipoff, the police impounded his passport and he was left with no way to get to Turkey. That was why he chose to cross the Bangladesh border and reach Syria via Afghanistan,” said an intelligence official.
Basith and two other ISIS fanboys from Hyderabad then came in contact with a person from Surat, who introduced them to a youngster from Karimnagar. The four youngsters had a series of Skype chats with an ISIS recruiter, who chalked out their plan to get to Syria via Bangladesh.
On August 29, 2014, four of them left their homes in secret and took a train to Kolkata, where they were detained by the Telangana police. “After he was counselled by the police, his parents was more strict. His father never let him out at night or early morning. He was also not allowed to use laptops or smartphones. But probably the counselling and restrictions didn’t work,” said one of Basith’s friends.
