The Kerala Police have launched a cyber offensive to defeat the public relations exercises of Islamic State (ISIS) through social media platforms for luring youths from the State even as the force is in possession of enough clues to believe that at least 14 Keralites who had joined the terror force had been killed since February this year in Syria and Afghanistan.
The strategy used in the offensive, jointly by Cyberdome, the Kerala Police’s technological research and development centre, and its Intelligence wing, is said to be three-pronged: Constant surveillance, deletion of information being circulated among people suspected to be in the terror network and posting positive messages in place of erased content.
The police’s plan is to bring all social media collectives suspected to have mysterious links under observation. Some 50 to 60 groups active over the social media are said to be under the surveillance of the police and these groups include not just those related to ISIS but also to other such movements and left extremists.
The police have learned that the ISIS has already reached its messages to hundreds of youths in Kerala through its social media groups like Message to Kerala, administered earlier by Shajeer Abdullah Mangalassery from Kozhikode, believed to be one of the earliest ISIS recruits from Kerala.
One of the methods of the police’s operation is said to be to subject open posts as well as messages directed to individual members of groups on social media networks to intense observation. Cyber experts in the police say that false news and fake videos intended at disrupting communal harmony are being exchanged over such platforms in a big way.
According to the police, most of the people indulging in this cyberspace propaganda are using false IDs and most of them are living abroad. Tracking them down accurately “in an ocean of data and traffic” is literally impossible, they say.
However, there are people – even within the police community – who hold that such a strategy would not have legal or moral sanctity, especially in the context of the recent Supreme Court verdict upholding right to privacy. Many cyber experts and rights activists believe that the very existence of Cyberdome is perhaps illegal and unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, the Kerala Police’s Intelligence wing has received enough clues to believe that at least 14 Keralite ISIS recruits have been killed in battles and that most of these deaths had occurred in encounters with the Syrian armed forces. Shajeer Mangalassery, known as the head of the Kerala wing of the ISIS, is said to be one among those killed in Syria and Afghanistan.
Shajeer, according to the Kerala Police and the National Investigation Agency, was behind the Malayalam medium websites and social media groups floated on behalf of the ISIS for luring Keralites into the terror outfit. The sites that were believed to have been under his control are no more functional, according to sources.
The ISIS recruits killed so far in Syria and Afghanistan include four from the group of 21 persons from Kasaragod and Palakkad, including six women and three children, who had gone missing from the country last year and were feared to have joined the ISIS. Three of them were from Kasaragod district and one, Yahia, from Yakkara in Palakkad.
The Intelligence wing of the police has also received information that among those killed were four persons from Kannur district, one from Kozhikode, one from Malappuram and two from Palakkad. However, one of these two persons from Palakkad, Abu Tahir, was said to be a recruit of an Al Qaeda wing in Syria.
If reports are to be believed, a minimum of 80 Keralites, including women and children, are in the camps of ISIS in Syria and Nagarhar in Afghanistan. Apart from them, many more persons from northern Kerala have already become ISIS sympathizers and several of them are said to be abroad.