Washington:

A senior ISIS official was killed in a US airstrike in Syria on Sunday, the US Central Command said in a statement on Wednesday (local time). The senior ISIS official and facilitator have been identified as Usamah Jamal Muhammad Ibrahim al-Janabi.

The US Central Command said that his death would disrupt ISIS’s ability to conduct terror attacks.

In a statement shared on X, US Central Command stated, “US Central Command Airstrike in Syria Kills Senior ISIS Official On June 16, US Central Command conducted an airstrike in Syria, killing Usamah Jamal Muhammad Ibrahim al-Janabi, a senior ISIS official and facilitator.”

“His death will disrupt ISIS’s ability to resource and conduct terror attacks. CENTCOM, alongside allies and partners in the region, will continue to execute operations to degrade ISIS’s operational capabilities and ensure its enduring defeat. There is no indication any civilians were harmed in this strike,” it added.

The US military continues to target ISIS officials in Africa and the Middle East, CNN reported. Nearly three weeks back, an airstrike conducted in a remote area near Dhaardaar in Somalia was assessed to have killed three ISIS terrorists, CNN reported, citing US Africa Command.

From January to March, CENTCOM and its partners killed seven ISIS operatives and detained 27 others in Syria. During the same time period, 11 operatives were killed and 36 people were detained in Iraq, the report said.

Earlier in April, CENTCOM commander General Erik Kurilla said, “We are committed to the enduring defeat of ISIS because of the threat they pose both regionally and globally,” CNN reported.

General Kurilla further said, “We continue to focus our efforts on specifically targeting those members of ISIS who are seeking to conduct external operations outside of Iraq and Syria and those ISIS members attempting to break out ISIS members in detention in an attempt to reconstitute their forces.”

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Moscow:

Two prison guards at a jail in southern Russia have been freed without harm after they were taken hostage by Islamic State inmates, with the assailants “liquidated”, the country’s prison service said Sunday.

“During a special operation… the criminals were liquidated and the employees taken hostage were freed and were not wounded,” the service said in a statement.

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Four ISIS terrorists were arrested in Ahmedabad yesterday, days after the city airport received a bomb threat. The terrorists – believed to be Sri Lankan nationals – were arrested by the Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad after a tip-off.

Giving details of the operation to arrest the four ISIS terrorists, police said multiple teams were formed after the officials received the information that the suspects were planning to travel to Ahmedabad to carry out terror attacks in India.

Vikash Sahay, Director General of Police, Gujarat, said these four terrorists had boarded an IndiGo flight bound for Ahmedabad from Chennai yesterday. “The arrests were made after checking the list of passengers coming from the Southern region and getting their identities confirmed by officials in Colombo,” he said.

Police said the four men “had been in touch with a man named Abu in Pakistan through social media”.

“Abu encouraged them to carry out a terror attack in India. They were so radicalised that they also agreed to suicide bombing. Pakistani resident Abu also gave them 4 lakh rupees in Sri Lankan currency,” Mr Sahay said.

They were also communicating with the ISIS leaders through Proton Mail, an end-to-end encrypted email service, officials said.

Officials said the suspects – Mohammad Nusrat (33), Mohammad Farish (35), Mohammad Nafran (27) and Mohammad Rashdeen (43) – wanted to “teach a lesson” to Jews, Christians and the members of the BJP and RSS.

“Evidence showing their commitment to join ISIS and follow the path shown by former ISIS Chief Abu Bakr Baghdadi,” they said.

The Ahmedabad airport on May 12 received a bomb threat email which turned out to be a hoax after security personnel searched the airport complex, but nothing suspicious was found.

Baghdad:

An army officer and four soldiers were killed in an attack on their post in Iraq’s central province of Salaheddin on Monday, officials said.

Iraq’s ministry of defence said that an officer and several members of his regiment were killed “while thwarting a terrorist attack”.

“Daesh terrorists launched an attack” on an army post in the village of Mtebija “killing four soldiers and the regiment commander,” said a security source, using an alternate name for the Islamic State group.

The jihadist group overran large swathes of Iraq and neighbouring Syria in 2014, proclaiming its “caliphate” and launching a reign of terror.

It was defeated in Iraq in 2017 by Iraqi forces backed by a US-led military coalition, and in 2019 lost the last territory it held in Syria to US-backed Kurdish forces.

But its remnants continue to carry out deadly hit-and-run attacks and ambushes, particularly from remote areas and desert hideouts.

In a report published in January, the United Nations said IS has “between 3,000 and 5,000 fighters” across Iraq and Syria.

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Guwahati:

The father of the arrested IIT-Guwahati student, who had allegedly pledged allegiance to terror group ISIS, on Tuesday said his son had spoken to his family members in Delhi that he would not continue with his studies and had other plans.

The accused Touseef Ali Farouqui, a fourth-year B Tech student of the Bioscience department was arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act on March 24. He is now in police custody.

”I live in Siwan in Bihar but he was with my wife in Delhi. My son had told her about not continuing with his studies as he had other plans,” the student’s father Asmat Ali Farouqui told reporters outside a court where his son was brought for some formality.

He will be produced in the court on Wednesday when his police remand ends.

”Definitely, there was something which his mother knew about but kept that hidden from the others,” the senior Farouqui said.

His wife who also came to the court did not speak to the media.

The student’s father claimed that the police did not allow him to talk to his son during the day.

His parents had arrived here on Friday and had gone to the police station where he was lodged to meet him the next day.

His father did not say anything about what transpired during the meeting.

The senior Farouqui denied speculations that he is separated with his wife and said he lived in Bihar to look after his agricultural land.

The accused was detained on March 23 at Hajo in Kamrup district and arrested the next day under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and UAPA.

Assam Police’s Special Task Force (STF) Inspector General Parthasarathi Mahanta had earlier said that after interrogating him, police found credible evidence of his links with ISIS and he was arrested.

The student was detained three days after the ISIS India head Haris Farooqi alias Harish Ajmal Farukhi and his associate Anurag Singh alias Rehan were arrested in Dhubri district after they had crossed over from Bangladesh.

STF Additional Superintendent of Police Kalyan Kumar Pathak had told reporters that the student had sent an email, in which he claimed that he was on the way to join ISIS.

A black flag, “apparently similar to that of ISIS”, was found in his hostel room and has been sent for verification to specialised agencies which deal with proscribed outfits.

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In June 2015, a few months after the Islamic State (IS) announced the establishment of its Wilayat Khorasan (Khorasan Province), the Taliban wrote a letter to the then IS chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, asking him to stop recruiting jihadists in Afghanistan. The letter, signed by the then political committee chief of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansour (who would take over the insurgency in a month and be killed by a U.S. air strike in May 2016), said there was room for “only one flag and one leadership” in the fight to re-establish Islamic rule in Afghanistan. But the IS faction, which came to be known as the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), did not stop recruiting disgruntled Taliban fighters. In the subsequent years, the IS-K attacked the Taliban for holding talks with the “crusaders” (read the U.S.) and abandoning jihad. It launched a series of attacks, mainly targeting Afghanistan’s Shia-Hazara minority.       

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Today, the IS-K has emerged as the most powerful and most ambitious branch of the Islamic State networks. It has training centres in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. It has recruited thousands of disgruntled Central Asians. It has stepped up attacks in recent months across the Eurasian landmass, including the January twin bombings of Kerman, Iran, a strike on a church in Istanbul in the same month and a massive attack on a concert hall in the outskirts of Moscow on March 22. Armed gunmen opened fire at the Crocus City Concert Hall and threw explosives, killing at least 137 people and wounding nearly 200 others, in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Russia in years. Russian authorities have arrested and charged four Tajik nationals for the attack.  

The origins 

When the Islamic State announced the formation of the Khorasan Province, referring to an area encompassing Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, in January 2015, the group’s immediate strategy was to exploit the divisions within the main jihadist groups operating in the region. It appointed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) commander Hafiz Saeed Khan as its leader and former Afghan Taliban commander Abdul Rauf Aliza as his deputy (both were killed in U.S. strikes). It attracted members from different militant organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Haqqani Network and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan into its fold, according to the U.S.-based Combating Terrorism Centre.

The IS-K declared its allegiance to Baghdadi. In operational tactics and ideology, it followed its parental organisation. The key goal is to establish “Islamic rule” in the “province” and for that they are ready to wage “jihad”. “There is no doubt that Allah the Almighty has blessed us with jihad in the land of Khorasan since a long time ago, and it is from the grace of Allah that we fought any disbeliever who entered the land of Khorasan. All of this is for the sake of establishing the Shariah,” the IS-K said in a video message in 2015.

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When the IS in Iraq and Syria came under pressure in 2015 and 2016, the core organisation shifted its focus to Afghanistan. The IS was losing territories to Kurdish militias in Syria and government forces and Shia militias in Iraq. In Afghanistan, a divided country with the government’s writ hardly reaching its hinterlands, the IS saw an opportunity to rebuild its organisation. Having built its base in eastern Afghanistan, the IS-K issued propaganda messages, calling on Muslim youth across Asia to join the group. Many radicalised youth, including dozens from India, travelled to Afghanistan to either join the IS or live an “Islamic life” under the Caliphate’s rule.

Rivalry with Taliban

The Taliban did not like its monopoly over violent jihad being challenged by another organisation. Also, the Taliban are a tribal, nationalist militant force, backed by Pakistan, whereas the IS-K doesn’t believe in national borders—they are global jihadists fighting for a transnational Islamist Caliphate.

“The leadership of Daesh [IS] is independent, the goals of Daesh are independent,” Omar Khorasani, who was the IS-K’s top leader, said in an interview in 2021. “We have a global agenda and so when people ask who can really represent Islam and the whole Islamic community, of course, we’re more attractive.” The ideological and operational differences led to open clashes between the IS-K and the Taliban. When the Taliban seized Kabul and took over prisons in August 2021, they freed several of their members, but executed Khorasani and other IS-K militants. Shahab al-Muhajir has been leading the terrorist group as its “Emir” since Khorasani was arrested in April 2020.

Why Russia and Iran?

The U.S. has carried out a number of targeted attacks, killing several of the ISKP’s leaders. In April 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered troops to drop the ‘Mother of all Bombs’, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb, on IS caves in eastern Afghanistan. But despite the U.S.’s targeted bombings and the Taliban’s counter-attacks on the ground, the IS-K has continued to expand its operations. When the Taliban established its regime in Kabul, the IS-K proclaimed that it is the real jihadist outfit. Militants from Central Asia who were part of the Islamic State Caliphate swelled the IS-K’s ranks after they relocated to Afghanistan.

The IS-K also launched propaganda videos targeting Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities such as Tajiks and Uzbeks, who were excluded by the Taliban’s Pashtun-only regime. Russia and its President Vladimir Putin emerged as the key enemy in the IS’s propaganda videos. After the Moscow attack, the IS said its soldiers had killed a “lot of Christians”. It also said Russia had “blood of Muslims on its hands”, referring to its military operations in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.

Particularly in Syria, where IS was founded in 2014 amid the country’s civil war, it had grand ambitions, which were thwarted by Russia’s 2015 intervention. The IS captured eastern Syrian cities of Raqqa and Der Ezzour in 2013 and 2024, and it wanted to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and capture Damascus, the seat of power of the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh century. But Russia’s intervention, along with help from Iran, made sure that President Assad survived the civil war.

In 2017, when the IS captured the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, Russians fought along with the Syrian troops to liberate the city. Subsequently, the IS’s physical Caliphate was crushed by a host of forces — Kurds, Iraqis, Syrians and Shia militias with air cover from Russia and the U.S. Now, the IS-K sees ‘Christian’ Russia and ‘Rejectionist’ Iran (in the IS lexicon, Shias are “rejectionists”, who reject the first three Caliphs of Sunni Islam) as top enemies.

Today, the IS-K wants to be the centre of global jihadism. Back-to-back attacks in different places from Istanbul to Kerman to Moscow suggest that the group is on a path to revival, six years after its physical Caliphate was destroyed. Chaos in West Asia, a base in Afghanistan, and foot soldiers from Central Asia are all helping the group expand its activities, with highly sophisticated internet propaganda.

Washington DC:

The United States does not see an imminent threat from the Islamic State group to the homeland, the White House said Monday, after the jihadists claimed a deadly attack in Russia.

“We don’t see an imminent, credible threat by ISIS to the homeland,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told journalists, using an acronym for the jihadist group.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Guwahati:

An IIT-Guwahati student has been detained after he allegedly pledged allegiance to ISIS in Assam’s Hajo on Saturday. The fourth-year Biotechnology student recently claimed on a social media platform and emails that he intended to join the terror outfit and went missing from the IIT-Guwahati campus.

This comes close on the heels of the arrest of the ISIS India head Haris Farooqi in Dhubri district after he allegedly crossed over from Bangladesh.

According to police sources, a lookout alert was issued for the student, who is a resident of Delhi, after he wrote an open letter on LinkedIn stating the reason for his decision. He was found in Hajo, around 30 km from Guwahati, in Kamrup district and detained for interrogation.

When police contacted the IIT-Guwahati authorities, they informed that said student had been “missing’ since noon and his mobile phone was also switched off.

“Reference IIT Guwahati student pleading allegiance to ISIS – the said student has been detained while travelling and further lawful follow up would take place,” Director-General of Police GP Singh posted on X.

Additional Superintendent of Police (STF) Kalyan Kumar Pathak said, “After receiving an email, we verified the authenticity of the contents and started an investigation.” The email was sent by the student, in which he claimed that he was on the way to join ISIS.

Special Task Force sources said that he was taken to his hostel room where cops recovered a black flag similar to the ISIS flag and an Islamic manuscript. He was a loner and didn’t have friends on the campus, police said.

Haris Farooqi, who has been active since 2019, was arrested along with his associates on Wednesday by the Assam police. His associate Anurag Singh alias Rehan belongs to Panipat and converted to Islam. His wife is a Bangladeshi national. Farooqi was suspected to be hiding in Bangladesh and carrying out radicalisation of Indians, sources said.

He has been instrumental in setting up modules in Jharkhand, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Goa, Punjab, Maharashtra and Karnataka. Farooqui, who is from Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, was wanted by the National Investigation Agency (NIA).

Moscow:

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Thursday it prevented an attack on a synagogue in Moscow that was plotted by an Islamic State cell, Russian state news agencies reported.

FSB said that the members of the organization had been planning “to commit a terrorist act against one of the Jewish religious institutions in Moscow”, the RIA news agency quoted the report as saying.

The attackers opened fire during the attempted arrest and were “neutralized by return fire”, the FSB said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New Delhi:

A special NIA court here convicted an operative of banned global terror group ISIS and sentenced him to seven years in jail, an official said on Tuesday. Adnan Hassan, who was arrested on January 29, 2016, over his affiliation with ISIS, was convicted by the special court in Delhi on Monday, a spokesperson of the federal agency said.

He was handed over the jail sentence along with a fine of Rs 4,000 under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

The official said Hassan was found guilty in the case related to the ISIS Abu Dhabi module. The case pertains to the criminal conspiracy involving Indian nationals Sheikh Azhar Al Islam Sattar Sheikh, Mohammed Farhan Mohammed Rafiq Shaikh and Adnan Hassan.

“These individuals are members of the proscribed terrorist organization, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), along with other yet unidentified associates. Their conspiracy aimed at identifying, motivating, radicalizing, recruiting, and training susceptible youths for planning and execution of terrorist attacks,” the spokesperson said.

The NIA had registered a case on January 28, 2016, under relevant sections of IPC and UA(P)A as on the orders of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs.

“The investigation has revealed that Hassan used a variety of online platforms and methods, including posts, news articles, comments, videos, images, and the commentary of Islamic scholars, to motivate individuals to join ISIS. He also provided financial support to the accused Abdullah Basith and other associates,” the spokesperson said.

On the basis of evidence, a chargesheet was filed against Hassan in the special court on July 25, 2016. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)