22 missing Kerala youth traced to ISIS training camp in Afghanistan: Sources

New Delhi: Sources in the Indian intelligence agencies have revealed that the 22 persons from Kerala who had gone missing between June and July last year are said to be in an ISIS camp in Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan. Nangarhar province is close to the country’s eastern city of Jalalabad and the ISIS camp in the region has approximately 3,000 terrorists. Sources say these persons went to the terror group’s training camp in Nangarhar via Dubai and Abu Dubai in the Middle East. The 21 people, including six women and three children, are originally from Kasaragod and Palakkad districts of Kerala. The number of the missing persons, all under the age of 30, well-educated (indeed exempting the children) and belonging to middle and upper middle class families, is officially said to be 21 but could be even more. Sixteen of those missing are born Muslims while two men and three women are converts into Islam from Hinduism and Christianity. Relatives, friends and neighbours of the missing Muslim youth vouch that they had never shown signs of being overly religious nor had they shown any interest in routine religious affairs. All used to be well-mannered young men and women who had opted for professional studies and acquired degrees in engineering, management and IT. Not even a petty case exists against any of them in any of the police stations anywhere. All had left their homes and villages within the past two months and had told their parents and families that they were going to Sri Lanka for religious studies or leaving for Mumbai or somewhere else in search of jobs or on some other reason. The first seeds of suspicion that they might have joined the Islamic State were sown after A Hakeem, one of those missing from Thrikkarippur in Kasaragod, sent a WhatsApp message saying, “From hell, I have reached heaven where I can lead an Islamic way of life.” That was about 11 days ago. Then the doubt spread that they could have gone to Syria or Afghanistan to join the terror force. Intelligence agencies are said to have received credible information that many of them had reached Islamic State camps and some of them could have used Teheran, Iran, as their transit point. However, the State and Central agencies are still either unable or reluctant to officially confirm that they have joined the Islamic State. The details of the missing people are interesting. The following list is of those missing from Padanna and Thrikkarippur areas in Kasaragod:

• Ijas, a doctor who used to practice in a hospital at Vadakara in Kozhikode district. Ijas is said to be one of the two chief organisers of the group and their long journey presumably to Islamic State camps.
• Ijas had taken his wife Rifaila (who on last Sunday told her father over voice-mail that they have not turned extremists) and their one-and-a-half-year-old son along with him. The woman was carrying her second child when they left.
• Ijas’s brother Shiyaz, a management degree-holder left home with his pregnant wife Ajmela, a physiotherapist.
• PK Ashfaq, a cousin of Ijas and Shiyaz. Ashfaq, son of a Kasaragod Muslim doing business in Mumbai, had left with his wife Shamsiya and two-year-old daughter.
• Hafeezuddin, son of Hakeem. He had got married just four months but “luckily, he has not taken his wife along,” says Hakeem.
• Muhammad Mansad
• Abdul Rasheed Abdullah, son of an NRI, holding an engineering degree. Rasheed, said to the captain of the team, is an engineer and was working with the local Peace International School on a paltry salary compared to the money he was earning when he was in the Gulf.
• Rasheed has taken his wife Ayisha, a Christian named Sonia who embraced Islam just before their marriage. They have taken their little daughter Sarah along with them. Ayisha holds BTech and MBA degrees.
• Marvan Islamil, another well-qualified Muslim.
• Feroze Khan, a BCom degree holder, who, according to Intelligence sources, was taken into custody from Mumbai last Sunday.

Those missing from Yakkara in Palakkad, the district from where one of the first cases of a youth who had possibly joined the Islamic State while working in the Gulf came to light, are all young people who had converted into Islam from other religions. Those missing are two young brothers, who were born and brought up as Christians and their pregnant wives, one a Hindu and the other a Christian, who embraced Islam. The brothers are well-educated.  They are:

• Essah, who used to be Begson Vincent in his earlier avatar.
• Essah has taken his wife Fatima, originally a Hindu named Nimisha from Attukal, Thiruvananthapuram, who was a BDS student in a Kasaragod college when she converted and married the converted young man.
• Essah’s brother Yahia, originally named Bestin.
• His wife Mariyam, a Christian girl named Merin Jacob originally hailing from Thammanam in Kochi. She was working with an MNC in Mumbai when her life changed.

The cases of Palakkad and that of Rasheed, who married Sonia alias Ayisha, have sparked a heated debate in Kerala. Mini, Merin’s mother, says she was brain-washed into embracing Islam. Bindu, mother of Nimisha alias Fatima, had fought a court battle with a habeas corpus petition to get her daughter back, but the court allowed her to go with her husband as she was no more a minor. Mini then petitioned directly to none other than R Sreelekha, IPS, the Additional DGP in charge of Intelligence, Kerala but that produced no result. Even after the marriage of her converted daughter to a converted Christian, she used to call up and call on her and the last meeting was in early May. Then she said she was going to Sri Lanka with her husband for business purposes. Since then, there is no information about her and what came later are the reports that she and her husband were among the group that might have joined the Islamic State. Reports since Sunday spoke of an MBA-holder from Chirakkal, Kannur, who had been working in Saudi Arabia for the past 10 years, going missing under mysterious circumstances since July last. He had disappeared with his wife and two children. The last message the parents got from him was that they were going for Umrah. Another report on a person’s mysterious disappearance came from Kanjikkode in Palakkad district. Shibi, a 31-year-old Muslim who was a classmate of Essah. Another young man, who had converted into Islam a year ago came from Angadippuram in Muslim majority Malappuram district. The parents of all those who have left – presumably in order to live in the “divine country” (of the Islamic State caliphate) – say that they had never shown any big interest in religious affairs but had developed the habit of being extremely religious, first showing the signs of being driven into Salafism and then more obscurantist Wahhabi thinking. “My son began to grow a beard and in some time it reached the chest level. He would want us all to grow a beard. He would object to our involvement in business, banking, etc. According to him all these were un-Islamic. No TV, videos, newspapers. We thought that this could be just a passing phase but it now seems that it was bigger than that,” said the father of one of the missing persons. According to relatives of the missing persons, they never wanted to be part of the religious customs the Muslims here, mostly Sunnis, had been following. “They were well beyond that as though their minds were riveted on the rustic life that is said to have existed in Dammaj in Yemen once upon a time. I thought it was some kind of Sufism that they were being drawn into. Or plain mental diversion,” said another parent. “I am sure of one thing. If they have joined the Islamic State, or if they want to join (investigators are unwilling or unable to draw any conclusion), they haven’t been drawn into it by its guns, swords, the brutal human rights violations, the violations of women of other cultures and sex trade that we keep on reading in newspapers. They were looking for some kind of life only ascetics can lead, I think. Still, I don’t believe they have gone to join the terror group,” he adds. As an indication supporting his thinking, Rifaila, wife of one of the pack’s leaders, reportedly sent a voice message to her father on Sunday claiming that the stories spreading in India about them were not truth. She said she and her husband were about to join jobs and had already arranged an apartment to live in. But she did not mention where she was sending the message from. Many psychologists in Kerala are of the opinion that the development could be part of a transformation – mostly temporary – taking place in the minds of the youth who had been living in the ‘boring shadow” of richness and luxury and they could have been feeling an urge to go Back to Nature, as some Islamic philosophers have said. Another problem, according to them, is that god has become an online entity these days and instead of content the new generation, going through the superficiality of technology and management in education are looking for words and not content and messages being given by the Quran. “It is online Islam,” says a professor specialising in West Asian studies. But what contradicts the theories on affinity to “qualified asceticism” are the reports that at least some of them have been listening to recordings of speeches by preachers like Zakir Naik. But the theory does not seem entirely pointless. There is a place called Athikkad in Nilambur in Malappuram district where a school teacher and religious scholar Subair Mankada, disillusioned into believing that all forms of organisations were fallacious after the split in the Kerala Nadvatul Mujahiddin, established a colony, rather commune, in a five-acre plot where people would lead a simple life. The idea got weakened after differences of opinion came up and the police are now looking into its affairs. (With additional information from VR Jayaraj)