Families and relatives of the 21 Keralites who had gone missing from the country last year and were believed to have joined the Islamic State (ISIS) in Afghanistan have started losing hopes of their return even as the investigation and Intelligence agencies are continuing their lookout for them at the various entry points into India.
The expectations of the near and dear ones of the 21 persons from Kasaragod and Palakkad, including six women and three kids, who had stealthily left the country for the ISIS camps in May-June, 2016 about their return began waning following the reports of the death of some of them in US attacks in Nangarhar, Afghanistan and Aleppo in Syria since February.
At least nine ISIS recruits from Kerala have reportedly been killed in Nangarhar and Aleppo in attacks mounted by the US forces and their allies. The National Investigation Agency has been able to confirm some of these deaths while the terror outfit’s propaganda wing for Kerala had propagated videos through social media platforms showing some of the dead Keralite recruits.
Of the nine killed so far, four were from the group of 21 from Kasaragod and Palakkad, two from Malappuram, two from Kozhikode including Shajeer Abdullah Mangalassery who the NIA thinks was the chief ISIS recruiter for Kerala, and one from Kanjikode, Palakkad. However, confirmation is yet to come on their deaths.
“Reports suggest that the Islamic State has been pushed out from most of its strongholds and the last bastion to fall was Mosul, which the group itself had projected as the headquarters of their Caliphate. In such a situation, the families and relatives think that their return is unlikely,” said a close relative of one of the missing youths in Padanna, Kasaragod.
According to an official of the Kerala Police’s Intelligence wing, the Keralite ISIS recruits may not be able to travel to India – “or for that matter to any country – legally as they cannot procure genuine travel papers from the authorities of the countries they are presumably in presently. “The only option is to organize fake documents and this need not be easy,” he said.
Pradeep Kumar, a resident of Thrikkarippur to where most of the 17 ISIS recruits from Kasaragod belong, said their families are currently going through the “painful psychological process” of coming to terms with the possible reality their “children-gone-astray” could be in. “Most of them have lost all hopes,” he said.
“The options before these young men and women are very limited. They can continue waging their so-called Jihad, for which the ISIS has persistently been exhorting all their possible victims, in the countries where they are holed up or choose to come back – if they can — and face the law here. Which way they will choose is the question,” Kumar says.
Relatives of the missing youths say that they were not individuals who seemed to have the capacity to live through privation and war. “I can’t still understand how these youths, all well-educated and grown up in the middle of affluence, could embrace such a vicious path that they should have known would lead only to self-destruction,” said a relative of a missing youth.
“They may be innocent children who chose the wrong path unknowingly or they could have been pretending to be pious souls when they were here. Irrespective of that and the fact that they had committed no crime here, the law here will not spare them if they come back. Either way, there is nothing much to hope,” he said.
However, the NIA believes that several of the “remaining” Keralite ISIS recruits may opt to return unmindful of what awaits them here because of the unimaginable difficulties they might be facing in the Islamic State strongholds, most of which have either collapsed or are under constant attack. The agencies, therefore, are keeping a strict watch at airports for such elements.
As per the finding of the NIA and the Intelligence agencies, more than 300 Keralites had gone missing from the Arabian Gulf in the 2014-16 period. The authorities think that several of them could have sneaked into Syria and Afghanistan to join the ISIS camps.
“No concrete information is available on their present condition,” said an official.