I/II.
http://www.ibtimes.co.in/discipline-discrimination-amu-vc-bans-female-students-library-says-they-will-attract-boys-613606
Discipline or Discrimination? AMU VC Bans Female Students in Library,
says They Will Attract Boys
By Neha Singh November 11, 2014 13:49 IST
Gender discrimination has found a whole new meaning in the latest
decision of banning female students from entering the library in
Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). University vice-chancellor Lt Gen
Zameer Uddin Shah has disallowed Women's College students' entry into
AMU's Maulana Azad Library stating that they will attract "four times
more boys".
Maulana Azad Library
Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University. Wikimedia Commons/Farzan44
However, the VC claims that he is more concerned about the space in
the Maulana Azad Library, which is not enough to accommodate girl
students from the varsity.
"The issue is not of discipline, but of space. Our library is packed," he said.
Not only the VC holds this discriminatory opinion, Women's College
principal Naima Gulrez too considers girls' presence in the library as
a distraction and an invitation to indiscipline.
"We understand the demand for access to the library. But have you
girls ever seen the library? It is jam-packed with boys. If girls too
were to be present in it, discipline issues might crop up," The Times
of India quoted Gulrez as saying during oath-taking ceremony of the
new students' union.
This tussle between the female students of the university and its
authorities is however not new. While students have long been
requesting permission to avail the library facilities citing ways to
counter the discipline problem, the authorities have been persistent
on their decision by not addressing their request.
"We are students of Aligarh Muslim University. We, too, should have
the benefit of accessing the famous Maulana Azad Library. The library
in the Women's College is not enough. If space is a problem, we can
just issue books and not sit in the library," Women's College
students' union president Gulfiza Khan said.
The university, however, does not seem to be satisfied with their
suggestions and has yet again denied them the liberty to browse
through the bulk of books in library and explore beyond their
curriculum. They insist that they should remain away from the library
premises and should ask for the books from their teachers when they
want.
"... In my time in 2010, the teachers told us that we will issue books
for you in our name, so you will not have to go there," a
post-graduate AMU student, who is also an alumna of the Women's
college, said.
Even the Maulana Azad librarian has a solution ready for the girls'
concern over getting books from the general library, if the books in
Women's College Library are not enough. "If the Women's College
library demands books, we send them instantly. The purpose is solved
without the students coming here," librarian Amjad Ali of the Maulana
Azad Library said.
The discrimination goes on despite the reservation of 12 out of 1,300
seats for AMU girl students in the library, however, the reservation
system for female students within the university library is already a
sign of discrimination.
Unlike the Women's College principal, assistant professor of History
Shadab Bano thinks that the peanut-size reservation granted in the
library is in fact responsible for the indiscipline that the VC fears.
"The discipline issue can be tackled only if women are not in a
minority in the library, which is usually packed with male students.
And also, it is the responsibility of the university to assure the
safety and protection of women," Bano said.
II.
http://fountainink.in/?p=6149&all=1
The boys from Kalyan
Posted by By ink at 4 November , at 05 : 34 AM
Home » Reportage » The boys from Kalyan
RIFLE
The story of India’s first recruits for global jihad, and how they may
not be the only ones dreaming of fighting for the Islamic State.
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALIA ALLANA
“Fighting has been enjoined upon you while it is hateful to you. But
perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you; and perhaps you love
a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah Knows, while you know not.”
—Surat Al-Baqarah (The Cow) 2:216
“So let those fight in the cause of Allah who sell the life of this
world for the Hereafter. And he who fights in the cause of Allah and
is killed or achieves victory. We will bestow upon him a great
reward.”
—Surat An-Nisā’ (The Women) 4:74
Areeb (Arif) Majeed had to go. Even if took him to the grave. Majeed
was embarking on a “spiritual journey”, one that took him from his
mohalla in Kalyan to the battlefield in Iraq where he fought alongside
his Muslim brethren under the banner of jihad. For he, devout and firm
in his belief, viewed this life as a waiting room. It was merely a
test for the hereafter where Allah watched over your conduct, conduct
that would be assessed on the Day of Judgment.
He didn’t inform his family of his hijr on the night of May 23. Had
his parents known of his imminent departure, perhaps they wouldn’t
have let him go. The mundane could have got in the way—the third-year
engineering student had an exam the next day; perhaps his sister’s
impending wedding would have kept him home.
So he left without a goodbye. He left a remarkable letter peppered
with language reminiscent of the English used in translations of the
Quran. Concise and with a methodology, it is a manifesto that will
resonate amongst puritanical followers of the faith anywhere.
He wrote: “O people of my house, including my father and beloved
mother, I love you so I am going on a spiritual journey. And when
Allah accepts my martyrdom, I will intervene for you because I love
you … Inshallah we will meet in jannah (heaven).
“It is a blessed journey for me, because I don’t want to live in this
sinful country,” he wrote. “I will always be in a crying state when I
see you all singing, smoking cigarettes, taking an interest in TV,
voting, illegal sexual intercourse, living luxurious lives,
intermingling of sexes, not praying, salah, not growing beards,
illegal marriages, backbiting, fashion (some members doing shirk).”
Shirk refers to wrongdoing.
Majeed died three months later, in an explosion in Mosul as US fighter
jets and drones pounded the Islamic State (IS) strongholds. He died a
member of the IS, the militant Islamist group that has exceeded
al-Qaeda in ambition and notoriety. He is the first Indian to
participate and be “martyred” in “Global Jihad”.
Three others, all in their 20s—Saleem Tanki, Aman Tandel, and Fahad
Shaikh—from his mohalla in Kalyan accompanied him on this journey to
Iraq, to what is now being referred to as the Islamic State.
For jihadis the world over, June 29 was special a day as the IS
broadcast a message on social media websites: “So rush O Muslims and
gather around your khalīfah, so that you may return as you once were
for ages, kings of the earth and knights of war. By Allah, if you
disbelieve in democracy, secularism, nationalism, as well as all the
other garbage and ideas from the west, and rush to your religion and
creed, then by Allah, you will own the earth, and the east and west
will submit to you. This is the promise of Allah to you.”
On that day, the notoriously private—there are only two photos of him
and one video clip—leader of IS Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the
formation of the Caliphate and setting up of a “state” of which he was
the Caliph. His ambitions and success have made him a legatee of the
global jihad franchise that Osama bin Laden helped create.
Baghdadi’s declaration was aimed at jihadis across the world.
Thousands of foreign fighters have responded from England to China and
fight under the flag of IS. The CIA estimates that the Islamic State
has up to 31,500 fighters and that it has ramped up its recruitment
campaign. The IS controls vast parts of Syria and Iraq, territorially
as large as Britain. At the time of writing, an IS video threatening
American president Barack Obama and his coalition has surfaced, and a
gun-toting 17-year-old Australian recruit levies the threats.
Majeed, one of his teachers said, was a “good boy; shy, soft-spoken,
devout.” [Editor’s note: Given the sensitive nature of the story, and
the fact that this is an ongoing investigation, most of the people
interviewed refused to be named.]
He was well-known and when his photo appeared in the paper, the
teacher was taken aback. Indeed Majeed was religious; he was almost
always in the front row of the prayer room. He never missed his
prayers but that was due to upbringing: since he was a little boy, his
father would wake him at the crack of dawn for fajr prayers.
A friend recalls the impact his Umrah pilgrimage had on him: “His eyes
welled up when he spoke of the great mosques of Mecca and Medina. He
was struck by how everyone was equal there: king and pauper bowed down
together to one God.”
Majeed’s Facebook post was proof: “It is Truly Said, that MAKKAH and
MADINA are the Holiest Cities Of The World. I Too Am A Witness Now …”
Those days, Majeed also identified himself as an Indian, sharing posts
from the “I Love India” group. With time, he would identify himself
less with the country of his birth and more as a global Islamic
citizen ready for the holy war.
By late 2011, his updates were all religiously affiliated. “Allah
closes doors; no man can open. Allah opens doors; no man can close,”
he wrote. In October 2013, he uploaded the picture of a poster that
read: “Ummah Bleeding, Ummah Sleeping.”
Ummah in Arabic means community and a hadith of the Prophet says: “The
Muslim Ummah is like one body. If the eye is in pain, then the whole
body is in pain, and if the head is in pain, then the whole body is in
pain.” This implies that if one Muslim is hurt, all are hurt.
By October, the civil war in Syria had taken a sinister turn as rebels
who had allied with militant Islamists were butchered in the name of
God. Increasingly the flag of ISIS (as they were called then)—black
with white writing that reads “There is no God but Allah” and a
reproduction of what many believe to be the Prophet Muhammad’s seal
(it reads: “Allah, Rasool, Muhammad”)—fluttered atop tanks on TV
screens and on social media.
By March 9, Majeed’s radicalisation was complete. He changed his
profile picture to the flag of the IS. He got rid of his identity—that
of a third-year engineering student from Doodh Naka, Kalyan—and
fashioned himself into a warrior of God, called upon to fight in
distant lands.
Majeed’s journey from a small-town boy to mujahid—someone who strives
or struggles in the name of Islam—was meticulous.
According to a senior officer of the Maharashtra police’s Anti
Terrorism Squad (ATS), and someone who has direct knowledge of the
case, Majeed created a fake identity on Facebook and much of his
radicalisation took place online. His nom de guerre was Abu Ali
al-Hindi (“Hindi” is Arabic for Indian) and spent months reaching out
to like-minded jihadis. Two independent sources, including one from
the ATS, told me Majeed attended a karate training camp in Panvel that
also imparted classes on religion.
Records with the ATS suggest that Majeed trawled jihadi-affiliated
sites even as he continued to remain on top of his studies. Soon a
“handler” reciprocated and passed onto Majeed the password to a jihadi
chat room and invited him into “closed” Facebook groups, according to
the ATS. Handlers act as go-betweens for jihadis and the mujahideen in
Syria and Iraq.
This password was the key that opened the door to this underworld.
The hijra was no longer an obscure religious or academic idea. Hijra
is the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in order to escape
persecution in 622 AD. It is also viewed as the start of the Islamic
era. In his goodbye note, Majeed wrote: “So, at the time of death, the
angel of death will ask me, ‘Why don’t you make hijr (migrate to Mecca
and Madina)? Allah’s land was spacious.’”
Majeed’s letter is striking, not just because of its clarity of
thought but also because of the Quranic verses he chose to quote.
Given that the quotes are Allah’s word, no Muslim will refute them but
Majeed failed to provide the context in which they appear in the
Quran.
Majeed viewed it as his duty to heed the call of Allah and migrate
while his father, Dr Ejaz Majeed, a doctor of Unani medicine, claims
his son was brainwashed to go and fight. He has demanded that the
perpetrators be brought to justice and has met Home Minister Rajnath
Singh on this matter.
Neighbours pity the doctor’s condition. “He stopped eating for a while
after Saleem Tanki broke the news of his son’s death. I’d seen him
sobbing over his desks. He still cries often,” said a neighbour.
Unlike Majeeb, Saleem Tanki had limited prospects.
He was a Class 12 Urdu-medium dropout. The only job he ever held, as
an employee at a call centre, wasn’t for long. He had frequent
nosebleeds and was sacked. Money was scarce. He only owned a `800
mobile phone, reveals a source close to the family, so indoctrination
on the Internet was unlikely. The source traces it all back to his
friendship with Majeed and their association that began at the Kot
Bahar Ahle Hadees Mosque.
For Tanki, life revolved around the Islamic Guidance Centre, which
aims to improve life for the Ummah while educating them, and the Kot
Bahar Mosque at Doodh Naka. It is here that both boys came into
contact with Adil Dolare, a volunteer at the Islamic Guidance Centre.
(Repeated attempts to meet Adil Dolare failed.)
The ATS source says that while the exact link hasn’t been ascertained
yet, authorities suspect that some amount of indoctrination and
brainwashing occurred at Doodh Naka, and possibly at the mosque and
the Guidance Centre.
The police zeroed in on Dolare, who owns a dried fruit business, since
he was the last person to be in frequent contact with all four boys in
the days leading to their departure. Of particular interest is
Dolare’s acquaintance with two Afghans who had visited Kalyan. Dolare
claims innocence and attributes work as the reason behind him visiting
Afghanistan.
“The dried fruit business is seasonal. Why does he travel when there
is no dried fruit season?” asks the ATS source. Another source at the
ATS reveals that they suspect the business to be a front for illegal
activities.
The night before his departure, Tanki informed his family of his plans
to visit Mahabaleshwar with friends. Days passed but he didn’t return.
His family tried calling him but his phone was switched off. The
family asked friends who were vacationing there to be on the lookout
but nobody saw him in markets or in tourist sites.
On May 26, the family filed a missing persons complaint at Bazarpeth
police station in Kalyan. Every passing day took its toll on his
mother. By the time news broke that he had joined the IS, she had lost
her mind. She closed herself in her house, and a source close to the
family says she started speaking to her son’s clothes. Tanki’s older
brother would find his mother nestled amidst his brother’s clothes,
mumbling into them.
Two months passed and at the end of July, Tanki called his brother’s
mobile. It was a six-digit number from a Voice over Internet Protocol
phone. He spoke briefly, saying that he was fine and his work would
take his entire family to heaven. Then he hung up.
The police had ordered the family to keep him on the phone for as long
as possible so that they could trace the call. But the call was short.
The family had already become the talk of the Choudhary mohalla.
Friends turned into strangers overnight as a sense of panic spread,
reveals a source close to the family. The ATS had already picked up
people for questioning, he said, and residents feared that even
speaking to Tanki’s family mark them.
As I walk down Choudhary mohalla looking for their house, a boy chases
after me. “Don’t go there,” he says. His mother had told him djinns
lived in the Tanki house.
Oddly enough, the house is on Google Maps as Tanki Mansion. I see an
unfinished home where, in the second floor, pieces of cloth are tied
where window panes ought to be.
“It’s taken me months to calm her. Just leave us alone,” Fayyaz Tanki
shouts. He is hysterical.
I just want to know where your brother is, I say.
“Raqqa. He’s in Raqqa,” he yells.
He wants to know what was wrong with that. “Why does everyone in the
media want to paint us as terrorists? Thousands of Indians work in the
Middle East,” he says. His brother was just another of them.
But Raqqa is the headquarters of terror, the home base of IS. It
controls the bakeries, the shops and provides all the services.
“He works in a hospital. He doesn’t kill people,” he says and slams
the door in my face.
The police have traced Tanki’s calls to Raqqa.
For Tanki, reaching Raqqa must have been a sort of homecoming.
A friend recalls a conversation they had in mid-2013. The call to
prayer had just sounded as the three boys made their way from Tanki’s
house. They passed the mosque opposite the port and talked in hushed
voices. There are 13 mosques in Doodh Naka so the call to prayer
drowned out their voice.
“Is the Islamic Army making headway?” Tanki asked?
Majeeb nodded and showed the boys a picture of the clock tower in Raqqa.
In the picture, the clock tower has the black-and-white IS flag on
display. Raqqa fell into the hands of the rebels, as they were then
known, after a four-day-long battle. Other Islamist factions competed
for the place but within a year, IS prevailed. It evicted other groups
and established for itself a base, a capital for the Islamic State.
The IS then began imposing its puritanical ideology upon the city,
bringing about its rapid transformation from a little known moderate
town to a de facto capital lost in time.
The clock tower—with statues of a man, woman and child holding a
torch—was vandalised. The heads of the statues were broken off. This
was indication of what was to come. The clock tower square is the site
of some of IS’s most brutal crimes. They have placed decapitated heads
on spikes here. The images have been broadcast through social media
sites as IS carries out a powerful propaganda campaign online with the
aim of radicalisation and recruitment.
This extremely puritanical interpretation of Islam must have struck a
chord with Majeed who laid out a “methodology” for good behaviour in
his letter. It read:
“Say no to:
1. Shirk (such as visiting babas)
2. Politics (democracy is shirk), voting (haram)
3. Backbiting
4. Shaving beards
5. Leaving pants down (wearing pants below the waist and letting pants
touch the ground)
6. Illicit sexual intercourse (avoid incest)
7. Leaving salah (praying)
8. Gambling
9. Cigarettes, hookah smoking
10. Fashion
11. Shaving off and many things.”
“The vision of the flag made Tanki go wild,” his friend recalls. He
was determined that the flag of IS be hoisted atop Kalyan’s clock
tower.
Kalyan sits two hours away from Mumbai. Mumbai’s consumerism and malls
have come here, looking for new untapped business. Stores sell the
latest fashions; a shiny shopping mall abuts a Domino’s outlet. A
giant poster with a scantily-clad woman announces the arrival of Zumba
Fitness Master Class for the “First Time in Kalyan.”
In the centre of all this activity stands an orange and yellow clock
tower. Around it are Internet cafes and pani-puri salesmen. To the
east lies Doodh Naka. Entering it is like crossing an invisible
boundary that demarcates the Muslim section from the rest of the town.
A proud auto driver says that the mohalla is “100 per cent Muslim”.
The wide lanes of Kalyan give way to unpaved roads in Doodh Naka.
Narrow lanes advertise tours for Haj and Umrah. Hindi is replaced by
Urdu on the sore façades, and neighbouring buildings are unpainted and
crumbling. It’s a ghetto of both space and mind.
There are mostly men on the streets and the few women out are covered
head to toe. Many wear black gloves to conceal themselves completely.
Girls as young as seven wear the headscarf.
A heavy-set man opposite Tanki’s house blames this segregation for
Tanki’s radicalisation. “Many here never felt totally integrated with
the rest of the society, we are the others,” he said. There are 1.5
lakh Muslims in Kalyan East, out of the total registered voting
population of 3 lakh. In this two-kilometre area, there are 13 mosques
and religion pervades all forms of life. Pious living has become a
competition, says Tanki’s neighbour.
In the house next to Tanki’s, a woman comes to the window. I ask her
about Tanki.
Did you know him?
“I’m not allowed to speak to anyone,” she says.
Allowed?
“I need permission to come to the window. My husband wouldn’t
approve,” she says and rushes back inside.
Two houses down, it’s a similar scene. Women aren’t allowed to come to
the windows. Almost all the women I spoke to weren’t allowed to study.
They are married early and spend most of their lives inside their
homes, seeking permission to be by the window.
Do you go out much, I ask.
“With my mehram sometimes,” she says. A mehram could be the father,
husband or son.
How do you pass your time?
“Prayer and Colours TV,” she says.
In his goodbye note, troubled by such behavior of women who were on
the wrong path, Majeed wrote: “To all my sisters and cousins. TV is a
professional way to prevail over nudity, lewdness, obscenity,
disbelief and shirk. If you all are attached to it for three to four
hours a day, you are destroyed.”
Walking westward from Tanki’s house, a cool gust of wind blows in from
the dormant port. A boy balances four cups of tea from Sahil
Restaurant on a silver tray and gives one to each of the four elders
sitting on benches. One of them tells me that the whole mohalla knows
about the boys’ participation in jihad, for the mohalla is that sort
of place, nothing remains private here.
Another wants to illuminate me. “There is a difference between a
terrorist and a mujahid,” he says. “A terrorist destroys his state and
a mujahid fights for Islam which is a divine instruction.”
So these boys are on the right path?
“Allah is the judge of right or wrong,” he says. “But here’s the
strange thing. I’ve been sitting in this spot everyday for the past 15
years. I see everyone who goes by. We all do. But none of us have ever
seen the four boys together. Where were they meeting?” he asks.
The online “handler” hatched the travel plans for the boys, the ATS
source says, refusing to divulge details as this is an ongoing
investigation. “It was meticulously planned. The timing was
impeccable.”
Majeed and Tanki purchased four tour packages, each priced at around
Rs. 59,786, to visit the holy sites in Iraq. The source of the funding
is not known yet. The tour would take them to Najaf, Karbala and
Baghdad along with 38 other pilgrims.
It didn’t matter that most of these were important in the Shia branch
of Islam. Nor did it matter that the boys prayed with the Ahle-Hadees
sect which disallows visits to shrines.
The tour operator met the four at Mumbai International Airport just
after midnight. They looked calm, he recalls. They stayed together
during the tour and slept on the ground next to each other in the rest
houses around the shrine. On the third day, the boys visited Imam
Hussein’s shrine in Karbala. On the morning of the fourth day, they
boarded a taxi bound for Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. They
didn’t take anything with them, their bags have been scrutinised by
the ATS.
“It isn’t a freak case that they landed up in Iraq as the battle was
picking up pace. It’s almost as though they got out of the taxi and
into the battle,” says the ATS source.
Nine days after they reached Mosul, the battle for the city was
underway. From June 6-9, around 800 IS fighters clashed with roughly
30,000 Iraqi soldiers and police, many of whom threw away their
uniforms and fled. The IS freed over 3,000 prisoners, overran key
military installations, and took control of Mosul International
Airport.
The capture of Mosul was a cause for celebration due to its strategic
location at the vital intersection of routes connecting Iraq to Turkey
and Syria. Coupled with the gains in Syria, Baghdadi presided over one
large, borderless, Islamic state and the international community
watched in shock as the IS marched onwards to Mosul Dam. A few foreign
fighters who had come to fight with IS set their passports on fire.
Pronouncements were made from IS trolls on the Internet that the next
step was Najaf and then Baghdad.
Meanwhile, the United Nations said they were witnessing one of the
largest and swiftest mass movements of people in the world in recent
memory. “The majority of Iraqis fleeing Mosul had to escape in a
matter of minutes,’ said a spokesperson.
Then America intervened, both to protect the integrity of the Mosul
Dam and to prevent the possible genocide of the Yazidi community. U.S.
F/A-18s and drones flew over IS strongholds and by the end of August,
IS was on the run as the US bombed its headquarters.
It was in this fight that Majeed is suspected to have died.
News of Majeed’s passing first reached Fayyaz Tanki. His brother had
called from another untraceable number. He was hysterical and asked
his older brother to pass on the message. Though the ATS had given
orders to keep the boys on call for as long as possible to trace the
call, this conversation was also short.
The day following Majeed’s death, all the mosques in Doodh Naka
offered Janaza-e-gayabana (prayers for the departed soul in the
absence of the body). Majeed’s father, it is said, cried during the
prayer. Nothing could assuage him. “He’s a broken man,” said Majeed’s
younger brother.
Two days later, a poster surfaced on the Internet. Posted by Ansar-ut
Tawhid fi Bilad al-Hind (AUT, translated as Supporters of Monotheism
in the Land of India), it changed the legacy of the boy. AUT—an
Afghanistan-based jihadi group that encourages Indian men to
participate in jihad both in Afghanistan and Syria—posted a picture of
Majeed on social media sites. In the poster there are two photos of
Majeed: in one he looks like a boy from anywhere in India, looking
away from the camera and smiling in a T-shirt with a funky haircut. In
another, he is carrying an assault rifle and has his head covered in a
keffiyeh, just like IS fighters. His index finger is upright,
indicating that there is only one God. IS fighters have increasingly
hijacked this notification that all Muslims practice.
The AUT eulogy in Urdu is addressed to “those who are searching for
paradise”, and celebrates Majeed’s martyrdom though it refers to him
by his nom de guerre, Abu Ali al-Hindi. The flowery tribute reads: “We
gave meaning to the ritual of love (for God), though it hurt our
hearts and cost us our lives; our sacrifice adds glory to the assembly
of martyrs, attained after sacrificing many dreams.”
A source close to the family says it was the poster that brought the
family some respite. Overnight, Majeed morphed from terrorist to
legend. A Muslim preacher, well-known nationally, reached out to the
family and offered to host and pay for Majeed’s sister’s wedding.
Majeed became a martyr. His death became a source of pride for his
family.
A source in the ATS confirms that forensic analysis of computers
seized from the homes of the four men show that they did visit
AUT-affiliated sites. AUT has broken its ties with Indian Mujahideen
and has pledged allegiance to IS.
According to ATS officials, the investigation has now gone beyond the
four boys from Kalyan. A senior ATS officer confirmed that cells have
been identified in Mumbai that are recruitment and training grounds
for those who want to fight for the Islamic State.
AUT, like many other militant Islamist groups, has pledged its
allegiance to IS. Through its media arm—Al Isabah Media—it uploads
propaganda videos that highlight the suffering of Muslims at the hands
of Hindus. The aim is to overthrow Hindu supremacy with the eventual
goal of establishing a Islamic caliphate.
One such video surfaced in mid October and begins with a quote:
“And what is (the matter) with you that you fight not in the cause of
Allah and [for] the oppressed among men, women, and children who say,
‘Our Lord, take us out of this city of oppressive people and appoint
for us from Yourself a protector and appoint for us from Yourself a
helper?’”—Surat An-Nisā’ (The Women) 4:75.
The camera zooms into an iPhone that shows a movie. In the movie, two
men ride on a motorbike. Other men join the two and then walk across
hilly terrain. They pause to pray with bulletproof vests on. They then
gather together in a cluster to perform a dua and pray to Allah in
Urdu. Their faces are covered with white balls of light.
“Please help us create a big opposition in India so that the crimes by
the Hindus upon us are over. Oh Allah, please help us. India is
biggest home for shirk (idol worshipping), send the world’s mujahideen
here … Please accept our prayer.”
They then march forward into gunfire and engage with their enemy.
The video had 10,834 views at the time of writing. It had been posted
two weeks ago by Ansaralmujahideen. The profile picture of the user is
Majeed’s.
IS cheerleaders share this video on Twitter and Facebook. Despite
social media sites’ attempts at removing the videos, online jihadis
have sought novel mediums of communication. An app has been created
that receives messages from the host and displays tweets on other app
users’ Twitter accounts. The aim of their propaganda campaign is to
radicalise and recruit.
I had met Abu Waleed, a rebel, on the Syrian-Turkish border in the
early days of the conflict in 2011. He was a moderate Muslim, driven
by secular ideas. Over the course of three years, this rebel
metamorphosed into a hardline Islamist. At times, he refused to engage
with me because I am a woman.
Majeed espoused something similar in his letter.
“Listen to the call of Fatimah,” he wrote. ***“The best women are
those who don’t see men and who don’t let men see them.”*** [Emphasis
added.]
Abu Waleed and I spoke again because of this story, and I enquired
after Abu Ali al-Hindi (Majeed) and the other three boys.
“There are more than three. The operation is much bigger. ISIS has
created a state and we need manpower to build this state. We have
engineers from China, fighters from Russia, and the South Asians,
Indians, will come to build our country. Just like they did in Dubai
and Doha.”
(Attempts to reach the family of Fahad Sheikh have failed though a
source close to the family has said that Sheikh is working in an oil
refinery and is earning a “very good salary”. There is no information
on Aman Tandel and his family refused to be interviewed for this
story.)
--
Peace Is Doable
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