Doubts over reports on the death of Keralite recruits in the Islamic State (ISIS) have strengthened further with information coming in that recruit Yahia (25) from Yakkara, Palakkad, who was thought to have been killed in a US attack in Afghanistan, is alive. The first doubts in this direction were raised after parents of another recruit, Shajil (36) from Chakkarakkallu, Kannur, received a message saying he had been killed in Syria.
Parents of Yahia had three weeks ago reportedly received a one-line Telegram message saying, “I am alive”, sent from the mobile phone number he had been using when he was in Kerala. In April, they had received a message saying that he had been killed in a US attack on an ISIS camp in Nangarhar, Afghanistan earlier that month.
Reports quoted Yahia’s relatives as saying that his phone had remained online even after the message on his death was received. If the messages they used to receive earlier were in voice format, the latest one was in text form, making the confusion over such messages further complex. The latest message has already been handed over to the investigators.
Yahia was one among the group of 21 persons, including six women and three children, from Padanna and Thrikkar-ippur areas of Kasaragod district and Yakkara in Palakkad district who had mysteriously gone missing from the country in May-June, 2016 and were feared to have been joined the Islamic State in Afghanistan.
Suspicions about the veracity of the reports on the death of Keralite ISIS recruits first came up after relatives of Shajil, a former activist of Islamist outfit Popular front of India, received a message early last month that he had been killed in an attack in Aleppo, Syria. The message was said to have been sent by his wife Farzana, who had gone to Syria with him.
The Kerala Police’s Intelligence wing, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the NIA are now in the process of carrying out a thorough probe on the basis of their inference — which they drew mainly from the strange response from his relatives — that Shajil might not have been killed and the message, sent in the name of Farzana, could have been intended at creating confusion.
While sources in investigative and Intelligence agencies are saying that they have no foolproof means of confirming such reports mainly because of the peculiarities of and the political and administrative vacuum in the regions to where these recruits had migrated, relatives seem to be suspicious of the approach of the agencies to the matter.
“Families have no clear information on anything. All reports are based on presumptions and ‘unidentifiable’ sources and full of ifs and buts. If the authorities can confirm Keralites’ presence in ISIS camps, why can’t they verify the veracity of reports on deathsIJ” asked a Kozhikode-based relative of one of the Kasaragod youths who had joined the ISIS.
Yahia and his elder brother Issah, Christians named Bestin Vincent and Bexon Vincent respectively before embracing Islam, had presumably sneaked into Afghanistan via Sri lanka. Yahia and his wife Mariyam, originally a Christian named Merin Jacob from Thammanam, Kochi, had gone missing from the country on May 15, 2016.
Mariyam had met Yahia when she was working with a multinational company in Mumbai. Issah and his wife Fatima, originally a Hindu named Nimisha from Attukal, Thiruvananthapuram, had left India three days later. Fatima/Nimisha had married Issah when she was a dental student in Kasaragod, according to her mother Bindu.
If the messages received by relatives are true, at least 15 Keralites recruits have already been killed in attacks, mainly by the US military, in Afghanistan and Syria. The first such message was received in February by the relatives of TK Hafeezuddin, one of the 17 persons who had gone missing from Kasaragod.