The National Investigation Agency (NIA) detained a module from the so-called Islamic State (IS) and arrested its two alleged agents, Ahamed Abdul Cader, 40, and Irfan Nasir, 33, of Bangalore on Wednesday, people familiar with the affair. He said. The agency has found that at least 13-14 people from Bangalore traveled to Iraq and Syria in 2013-14. Two of them are believed to have died in Syria while fighting for the Islamic State, while some quietly returned in 2014, the people said. Many of them are still on the run.
The Islamic State invaded swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014. Iraq declared a victory over the terror group in 2017. In March 2019, US-backed forces in Syria said they had also defeated the group in Syria and marked the end of the territorial policy of the group. control.
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The people said that NIA has identified all members of the module and that they are being vetted to find out who they were in contact with and their activities. They added that the returnees from the module in Bengaluru were disillusioned by the life promised by IS, as there was nothing Islamic about their activities.
Cader, a bank business analyst, and Nasir, who runs his family business, reportedly radicalized most of the module’s members and arranged travel finances for at least its five members.
A larger 22-member module traveled to Iraq and Syria in 2016 from the Kasaragod and Palakkad districts of Kerala. This is believed to be the largest group to have traveled to the region from India.
Authorities said several agents have traveled to ISIS-controlled territories in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan since 2014, but in smaller groups or individually. “The Kasaragod module was the largest module and now this latest Bengaluru module appears to be large, as 13-14 people were together,” an official said on condition of anonymity.
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Authorities said the agency learned of the Bengaluru module while questioning Abdul Rahman, an ophthalmologist arrested in Bengaluru in August in connection with the case of Jahanzaib Sami and Hina Bashir Baig, the couple arrested for their alleged ties to the Islamic State.
They cited Investigations and said that Cader, Nasir and some of their associates were members of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT) and later formed a group called Quran Circle and radicalized gullible men in Bengaluru. They allegedly raised funds and financed their visits to Syria to help the Islamic State and promote its ideology and activities.
Authorities said Cader allegedly raised HuT funds and sent them to Syria through his bank account. Cader, Nasir and their other associates organized funds to facilitate the visit of the defendant Abdur Rahman and other men from Bengaluru to Syria to join ISIS, they added.
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