‘IS tapping into local groups in S. Asia’

The region has seen proportionally less IS recruits travelling to Iraq and Syria other parts of Asia.

The Dhaka café siege earlier this year and the recent attack at a police academy in Quetta in Pakistan claimed by the Islamic State indicate that the terror group is trying to “tap into already established jihadist groups” for its operations in the subcontinent, says a terror expert well versed with the IS’s online presence.

“ISIS has been seeking to cultivate for attacks in South Asia or what it calls the Khorasan region,” Amarnath Amarasingam from the Programme on Extremism of George Washington University in the U.S. told The Hindu .

“They are trying to set up shop and grow (in the region), but it may be much harder for them to do so today. This is mostly why we are seeing ISIS tap into already established jihadi groups like LeJA (Lashkar-e-Jhangvi) in Pakistan and JMB (Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen) in Bangladesh,” he added.

Mr. Amarasingam said his analysis was based on online conversations with IS recruits in Syria/Iraq as well as the spokesperson for the LeJA offshoot that claimed responsibility for the Quetta massacre in which more than 60 cadets were killed.

Despite it’s large Muslim population, South Asian has seen proportionally less IS recruits travelling to Iraq and Syria than West Asia and South East Asia.

“With some losses in Syria and Iraq, I do think greater attention will be to foreign theatres, and they will seek to ally themselves with established groups, simply because it is operationally easy and they don’t have to spend years setting up trusted networks,” he said.

When asked about India’s concerns of attacks here and the recent violence in Kashmir being used as a propaganda tool by IS recruiters, however, he said that he had “not really” seen an increase in focus on India.