Several Pakistanis have been detained in Sri Lanka over the recent serial bombings. A police spokesman said on Thursday in Colombo that a group of Pakistanis had been detained overnight among an unspecified number of foreign nationals for overstaying their visas.
This makes it clear that they have no direct links to the attacks on three churches and four hotels. The attacks killed 359 people and also wounded around 500 in possibly the deadliest operation claimed by the Islamic State group.
The fact that a few Pakistanis have been detained for overstaying their visas has come as great relief to us, as we, along with Muslims from other countries, are being viewed with suspicion because of the misdeeds of few misguided people.
The horror that groups like the IS have been wreaking in different parts of the world raises many questions. They claim they are fighting for the cause of Muslims. But in reality they are adding to the problems of the very people whose cause they claim they are championing. Whenever such groups claim responsibility for terror attacks, Muslims everywhere feel increasingly unsafe and vulnerable.
With friends like these does the community need enemies? It seems that the terrorist groups not only have a medieval mindset but they also think they live in the medieval age. Now the world is a global village. So happenings in one place of the world have repercussions everywhere. One wonders why this simple fact has been lost on the so-called champions of the Muslims.
Seen in the regional context, the attacks in Sri Lanka have brightened the chances of religious extremist parties in the ongoing Indian elections given that they are campaigning on a venomous anti-Muslim plank. This is evident from the irresponsible manner a section of the Indian media is commenting about the detention of Pakistanis in Sri Lanka. The Foreign Office has roundly condemned the Indian media for spreading falsehood. https://tribune.com.pk/story/1959388/6-detentions-sri-lanka/
Sri Lanka bombings may mean Islamic State, after its Middle East defeat, has entered a new phase
by Arnab Neil Sengupta in SCMP, Apr 26, 2019
The writer is an independent journalist and commentator on the Middle East
Now that Islamic State (IS) has claimed responsibility for the deadly bombings of Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka via its Amaq propaganda agency, it is time to focus on the big picture.
From the outset, IS was the name that leapt out as the prime suspect from the fairly large pool of transnational terrorist organisations active around the world, yet this prompted the question of why it would pick the Indian Ocean island to unleash attacks typical of the killing fields of Afghanistan and Syria.
IS always has ample motive to target churches, synagogues, temples and mosques frequented by Muslims, not to mention luxury hotels popular with Western tourists. What influences the choice of location for attacks is probably the means and opportunity to stage them.
After its defeat at the hands of a US-led coalition spearheaded by secular Kurdish and Arab soldiers in March and the elimination of the caliphate along the Syria-Iraq border, IS today is the jihadist equivalent of a wounded tiger, prepared to strike at any targets of opportunity.
As a transnational terrorist organisation, IS currently poses the same or a higher level of threat to non-Muslim communities al-Qaeda and its offshoots once did. It displays an unremitting animus towards Shia and non-observant Muslims, plus Muslims with heterodox beliefs such as the Alawites and the Druze.
That being said, IS may have concluded that its attacks on Shia Muslims in Afghanistan or non-Sunni communities in the Middle East are not creating enough buzz to prove its mettle, inspire attacks and attract new recruits.
Only a spectacular attack against what IS calls “nationals of the Crusader alliance and Christians” packs the punch to make headlines around the world, showing it has avenged its humiliating defeat in the Middle East. There was no shortage of motive for IS to mastermind the Easter Sunday attacks that killed more than 350 people and wounded 500 more.
Regarding means, IS must have found Sri Lanka to have not only dropped its guard after the winding down of the civil war in 2009, but also lulled into complacency by the peace dividend and driven to distraction by political infighting.
That hundreds of kilograms of explosives could be smuggled into different cities, then apparently detonated by suicide bombers, signifies a security lapse unforgivable in the age of transnational terrorism.
If lax security is why the jihadists decided on Sri Lanka, then the government in Colombo has a lot of explaining to do. It will pay a high price, as spooked tourists are likely to avoid the tropical paradise in the near future, in a reprise of the economic blow to Bali after the terrorist bombings of 2002.
That IS had the means to carry out devastating attacks on Sri Lankan soil should come as no surprise, given its track record of hitting European countries despite their much bigger intelligence and national security budgets and services.
The Sri Lankan government’s claim about the involvement of the little-known National Thowheed Jamath amounts for now to little more than proof that the home-grown jihadist group possibly acted as the cat’s paw for a larger, more violent transnational terrorist organisation.
Admittedly, IS has not been successful of late in inspiring attacks of the type that killed hundreds of civilians in Paris, Nice and other European cities between 2015 and 2018. But this does not in any way prove that it lacks the means to exploit flaws in the administrative systems of poorer and less security-savvy countries, of which Sri Lanka is just one.
Whether the terrorist infrastructure that facilitated the attacks was entirely local in nature, the fragile multi-ethnic and multi-religious make-up of Sri Lankan society, coupled with its long history of racial and communal pogroms, surely is an open invitation for any transnational jihadist organisation looking to set up local cells.
Given that IS is much less fussy than al-Qaeda when it comes to target selection, Sri Lanka must have offered a plethora of opportunities. Ever since the Tamil insurgency died down in the island’s north with the defeat of the Tamil Tigers and the elimination of its top leadership, Sri Lanka’s hospitality sector has been on a path to recovery and the country has become a popular tourist destination globally.
In 2018, Sri Lanka welcomed 2.3 million tourists, 10.3 per cent higher than the previous year’s figure. The country is especially popular with visitors from non Muslim-majority countries (and therefore attractive IS targets) such as India, China, Britain, Germany and Australia. For the current year, Sri Lanka has a target of 3 million tourists and US$4 billion income.
In the coming days, discussions in terrorist chat rooms may or may not provide independent corroboration of IS’ ownership of the Sri Lanka attacks. Actually, avoiding or delaying claiming responsibility has its advantages for jihadists in the present polarised global political environment. It prods social media and news media outlets into engaging in the sort of speculative reporting and unpacking that risks reinforcing the mistrust and suspicion on which transnational terrorism thrives.Furthermore, what perhaps unwittingly advances the objectives of jihadists is the kind of facile connection made by some reporters between the Easter Sunday terrorist bombings and the Sinhalese Buddhist mob attacks on Sri Lanka’s Muslim minority after 2014, as well as other instances of persecution of Muslims in Asia.
Such exercises are reminiscent of knee-jerk attempts to rationalise the September 11 al-Qaeda attacks as inevitable payback for Washington’s support for Israel in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Colombo declared victory in its bloody 26-year civil war against the Tamil Tigers in 2009. The Tamil Tigers, much like modern Islamic extremists, were notorious for their suicide bombings, carrying out more than 130 such attacks. Photo: AFP via Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence
The theory that home-grown radicals belonging to a Sri Lankan religious minority (Muslims) would, of their own accord, slaughter members of another minority (Christians) and foreigners as revenge for past attacks against Muslims by the majority Sinhalese Buddhist community is hard to accept without a willingness to suspend disbelief.
When all is said and done, for the wounded survivors and the grieving relatives of the victims of the Sri Lanka bombings, it probably will matter little whether the attackers were local extremists or IS jihadists or a mixture of the two.
But depending on how the investigation goes, the ramifications of an IS-inspired attack of this scale are likely to be huge for the ongoing global campaign against the jihadists.
Far away from the bloodied pews of Sri Lanka’s churches, the soldiers of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have done humanity a gigantic favour by defeating the barbarians of IS on their home turf. But clearly, combating a terrorist organisation that views the entire world as a theatre of war cannot be achieved by military means alone.https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/3007429/sri-lanka-bombings-may-mean-islamic-state-after-its-middle
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