Kerala man fighting for IS in Afghanistan killed, second in a fortnight

Hindustan Times, Shishir Gupta, August 08, 2019

A Kerala man who went missing last year and joined the Islamic State has been killed in an operation by Afghan-US forces in Afghanistan, a senior intelligence official said on Wednesday.

Saifuddin is the second resident from the state to have been killed fighting for the IS in Afghanistan over the last fortnight, a fact that underlines the deepening influence of the extreme Salafi ideology in the state.

Security agencies have been able to track 98 cases of men, women and children from Kerala joining IS terrorists. By June this year, 38 of them had died.

Malappuram, 350 km from state capital Thiruvananthapuram that was home to Saifuddin, is among the top three districts that have accounted for the largest number of people who joined the uber radical group comprising IS remnants from Syria and Iraq that are trying to expand their footprint towards Kabul.

Kannur and Kasargod are the other two.

Saifuddin had turned to extreme Salafism when he was still completing his studies. His interest in the Salafi ideology deepened after 2014 when he migrated to Saudi Arabia to get himself a job. He found one in the Saudi kingdom’s port city of Jisan and also kept attending Salafi religious classes at different centres, a security official said.

Intelligence officials who have profiled Saifuddin pointed there were no indications that he would take the leap and join the Salafi-jihadist group IS. But in September last year, Saifuddin abruptly headed back home in September 2018.

He spent 10 days at home in Malappuram’s Pookiparambu. Then, Saifuddin had got himself a visa to travel to Dubai and quietly left home.

Saifuddin did occasionally keep in touch with his family mobile messaging services. But he never really told them where he was, or the job that he had picked up. The closest that he came to giving any information about what he was doing was in April this year when he told his sister that he was in the UAE to learn more about religion.

Intelligence officials said they were trying to ascertain links between Saifuddin and other IS recruits from Kerala. For now, they found that Saifuddin wasn’t the only one in his locality who may have been recruited by the IS. A friend of Saifuddin, also missing for some time, is also believed to have been recruited.

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