Re: ISIS recruiting Indian muslims to fight in Iraq and Syria
The jihadists have an appeal to the youth. The feeling of being powerful is very intoxicating. I have seen all of this during my college life. The threat is real, Indian government can take it as they wish.
The ISIS Siren Call to India’s Muslims - WSJ
Consider the evidence. At least four Indian Muslims have reportedly signed up to fight with ISIS in Iraq. Last week, one of them, a 22-year-old engineering student named Arif Majeed, was reported killed, possibly in a U.S. airstrike. He left behind a letter to his family in which he explained his reasons for traveling from his home outside Mumbai to Iraq: “It is a blessed journey for me, because I don’t want to live in this sinful country.”
Meanwhile, police in the southern state of Tamil Nadu arrested a Muslim cleric after a group photo of young Muslim men posing outside a mosque in ISIS T-shirts began to circulate on social media.
These may be isolated incidents, and the vast majority of Indian Muslims shows no signs of being attracted to any jihadist group. But ISIS has arguably made a bigger splash in India in three months than al Qaeda could manage in the 26 years since it was founded in Pakistan by Osama bin Laden.
ISIS enjoys many advantages that so-called core al Qaeda, the parts of the network based in Pakistan and Afghanistan, lacks. First, in terms of the kind of symbolism that fires up jihadists, it’s hard to beat the re-establishment, at least notionally, of a caliphate uniting all believing Sunni Muslims. ISIS controls an estimated 35,000 square miles of territory, about the size of Jordan. The group has effectively erased the border between Iraq and Syria created by an agreement between Britain and France in 1916.