By
Samanth Subramanian
July 2,
2020
There’s a
video of the exact moment Inshaf Ibrahim decided to abandon his life as a rich
young man and turn into a mass murderer. In one sense, he had made up his mind
weeks earlier, which was why he was loitering in the Cinnamon Grand hotel’s
breakfast buffet on Easter Sunday last year in Colombo, strapped into a knapsack
of explosives. Once he arrived, though, he appeared to dither. Later,
investigators picked him out of CCTV footage, standing near a vacant table,
wearing a baseball cap and a T-shirt, his back to the camera. In the footage,
he moves like a perplexed penguin. Two steps forward, half a step back, a turn,
another turn: a choreography of hesitation. Perhaps he is reconsidering? But
no, the investigators concluded; he is waiting for more people to come in.
Finally, a microsecond of stillness, arms heavy by his side; then his hands
reach toward the front of his waist, and the film goes dark.
Colombo,
the capital of Sri Lanka. Coordinated attacks by suicide bombers in April 2019,
which killed 269 people, are still reverberating throughout the country.
Credit...Mahesh Shantaram for The New York Times
-----
The
restaurant, Taprobane, was one level below the lobby, so when a hotel employee
on the same floor heard the muffled boom, he thought something must have fallen
into the dining room, possibly a chandelier. When he got closer to the scene,
he saw smoke and people carrying out bodies. He asked what happened, but no one
had time to talk. A fire, he figured. Then he entered the restaurant, saw the
devastation and revised his guess: gas explosion. On his phone, he has a video
he shot: the glass windows overlooking the garden blown out, ceiling panels
ripped away, the omelette stations pulverized. “Some of the foreign guests were
bigger than us, so we had to put them onto banquet tables and carry them out,
four to a table,” he told me.
Relatives
mourn beside a coffin of a bomb blast victim during a burial ceremony, days
after a series of bomb attacks targeting churches and luxury hotels in Sri
Lanka left 359 people dead. (AFP file photo)
-----
After the
bodies — 20 of them — had been cleared, the employee went back in with the
police. “That was when I saw the head of the bugger,” he recalled. “I knew it
was a suicide bomber. We all know that if a bomber blows up a bomb on his
torso, you’ll find his head separately.”
Sri Lanka
has a long, morbid familiarity with suicide bombing. During a civil war that
lasted from 1983 to 2009, the guerrillas of the Tamil Tigers used the tactic
extensively, trying to compel the government to grant the island’s
Tamil-speaking minority its own nation. Men and women in suicide boats, ramming
into naval ships; in suicide vests, assassinating presidents and prime
ministers; in a suicide plane, hurtling into a government building; in suicide
trucks stuffed with explosives, driving into a Buddhist temple in Kandy, the
World Trade Center in Colombo and the Central Bank down the road from the
Cinnamon Grand.
Even so,
Easter Sunday came as an incomparable shock. The Tigers had never pulled off an
attack so audacious and meticulous. Ibrahim was one of eight bombers who struck
across Sri Lanka that morning. His associates attacked two other hotels; his
younger brother, Ilham, was one of two human bombs at the Shangri-La. Others
detonated themselves in churches in and around Colombo and in the eastern town
of Batticaloa, just when the faithful had assembled for Easter Mass. Two
hundred sixty-nine people were killed in all. Their bodies were left in so many
pieces that, at first, the authorities thought the death toll to be at least
350.
Everything
about Easter Sunday was confounding: the scale of the destruction, coordinated
under the nose of Sri Lanka’s security apparatus; the selection of churches as
targets, even though Christians, who make up just 7.4 percent of the
population, have never fallen neatly on either side of Sri Lanka’s various
communal divides; and ISIS’s claim upon these attacks two days later, complete
with the obligatory video of the eight men swearing allegiance to the
caliphate’s chief at the time, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi— even though ISIS wasn’t
known to have a toehold in Sri Lanka.
Sri
Lankan security personnel standing guard after the bombing at the Shangri-La
Hotel.Credit...Ishara S. Kodikara/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images
-----
Easter
Sunday turned out to be the most horrific example of ISIS’s successful
franchising of terrorism — worse than the siege in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2016,
or the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., in 2015, or the Bataclan attack in
Paris that same year. The bombings surprised Bruce Hoffman, a longtime scholar
of terrorism and insurgency at Georgetown University, both because they were
planned amid heavy ISIS losses in Iraq and Syria and because the bombers, such
nobodies, were able to build and detonate these sophisticated explosives. They
proved that small cells can now operate with the capacities of established
groups, Hoffman says, and that these franchise attacks will continue without
any direct supervision from ISIS headquarters — even after the United States
killed al-Baghdadi last October. Such strikes, he says, “can be carried out on
the ground by locals, if they’re determined and frustrated enough.”
In this
respect, the Ibrahim brothers flouted all expectation. Many Muslims have
suffered in Sri Lanka: targeted by the Tigers in the 1990s, or by Buddhist
extremists over the past decade. Not the Ibrahims; the country was good to
them. Their father, Yusuf Mohamed Ibrahim, came to Colombo as a boy from a
village in the hills and, by becoming one of Sri Lanka’s leading spice
exporters, built a fortune, owning land all over Colombo.
Inshaf, who
was 36, worked in his father’s company and then set up his own, to refine and
export scrap copper. He lived with his wife and four children in downtown
Colombo and was considered a consummate success. Ilham, who was 33, didn’t want
to work and didn’t have to. His family lived with his parents in a plush pocket
of bungalows called Mahawila Gardens. The Ibrahim residence was the grandest on
the street; one neighbor told me she called it “the palace.” On the afternoon
of Easter Sunday, when the police raided the house, Ilham’s wife, Fatima,
flipped the switch on her own suicide vest, killing herself and their three
children. She was expecting a fourth.
Of all the
bombers, these two young men proved the most baffling to other Sri Lankans.
There have always been well-off terrorists, even wealthy ones. Still, when new
examples emerge, they force us to re-examine a tenet of modern life: our belief
that security and economic comforts are the rudiments of a peaceful community,
and that people turn against strangers only when they face some material peril
or privation. Most of us associate violence with desperation. What did the
Ibrahim brothers have to be desperate about?
Two days
after the bombings, Sri Lanka declared a state of emergency, allowing its
Criminal Investigation Department to arrest whomever it liked without a warrant
and hold detainees indefinitely. Until the emergency was lifted, on Aug. 22,
the country was dangerous for anyone who admitted to knowing any of the
bombers, or indeed for any Muslim at all. Nearly 300 people were arrested,
among them Muslims who owned a suspicious number of SIM cards, or had a Quran,
or wore a caftan printed with what looked like the sacred wheel of Buddhism. It
wasn’t just the state that lashed out. Not far from Colombo, Muslims were
attacked by vigilante mobs. In November, Sri Lanka elected as president a
former defense chief named Gotabaya Rajapaksa, whose ruthlessness against
minorities and dissidents prompted his own family to call him the Terminator.
Under Rajapaska, a spate of new arrests ensued — including, in April, that of
Hejaaz Hizbullah, a lawyer who has represented Mohamed Ibrahim in some of his
business affairs.
When I was
in Colombo last August, some of the Ibrahims were still in detention for
questioning. The others were soon released, but the father remains in custody,
so I couldn’t reach him; he could be held for up to 18 months without charges
under an antiterrorism law. The last time he was seen in public was at the time
of his arrest, outside his house. A photograph showed a stocky man of 65, with
close-cropped hair and a spray of gray beard. He wore a white sarong, a blue
T-shirt and a look of bewilderment. His feet were bare, as if his slippers had
fallen through the gulf that had opened between his old and new worlds.
Everyone
called him Hajiar — one who has performed the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Hajiar was a man of plain habits, the kind of millionaire who, if his car was
unavailable, was happy to hail a trishaw to go to his office: Ishana Exports,
37 Old Moor Street. A three-floor building done up in smooth red and cream,
Ishana looked nothing like other structures in Pettah, the commercial heart of
old Colombo. Pettah lies just outside the walls of the city’s first colonial
fort, constructed by the Portuguese in 1518, and its lanes are jammed with
handcarts, trishaws and small trucks delivering vegetables, vendors selling
sliced fruit and cars parked at brazen angles. Other buildings wear their age
in their scabby, rain-damaged paint; Ishana was the sleek, prosperous beast in
the pack.
Mohamed
Ibrahim’s Ishana Exports building in Colombo.Credit...Mahesh Shantaram for The
New York Times
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One
morning, I went to the store of another spice merchant, a relative of Hajiar’s.
He sat behind a glass-topped table with a phone and a calculator at hand. The
floor was filled with open sacks and barrels of spices. The air was savory:
cinnamon, black pepper, a hint of cardamom.
No names,
he requested. You know the situation. You know what the political climate is
like.
When Hajiar
was 13, he left his village of Deltota for Colombo. His father married a second
time after his first wife died, and Hajiar was the 17th of 18 children. They
weren’t well off, and a young man wishing to make the most of life had to seek
the metropolis. In Colombo, Hajiar worked in a shop, earning 60 rupees a month
cooking meal for the other employees. He got to know Pettah’s vegetable vendors
and quit his job to become a broker. “Onions, potatoes, things like that,” the
relative said. “He’d buy from here and sell there. For every sack, he made a
two-rupee brokerage fee.”
Hajiar
invested his earnings in his first spice business, then moved to manage another
and finally started Ishana in 1986. His representatives around the country
bought spices, which Ishana shipped overseas: areca nuts to the Maldives, and
pepper, cloves, nutmeg and mace to India. Hajiar built his company until a full
third of Sri Lanka’s black-pepper exports were going out with Ishana’s name on
the cargo manifests. In his business dealings, one of his associates told me,
Hajiar had very few rules. He was the sort of guy you see in Tamil movies, the
associate said: the rich man who came up the hard way. “He has a lot of money,
a lot of influence. He massages the system, and he massages it for the good of
other people as well.” At its peak, Ishana exported 250 full shipping
containers in a year, one of Hajiar’s managers told me. Its revenues touched
eight billion rupees, or more than $40 million. In Sri Lanka, where the per
capita income is around 660,000 rupees, the Ibrahims became wealthy beyond the
dreams of little Deltota.
When Ishana
was still a fledgling enterprise, Hajiar lived alone in Colombo. He had married
a woman named Kadija from Welamboda, another hill-country village. An appavi,
Hajiar’s relative called her: a naïf. They started a family — they would have
nine children — but it wasn’t until the early 1990s that they left Welamboda
for Hajiar’s tiny apartment above the store on Old Moor Street.
No one I
spoke to seemed to have quite worked out how to discuss Inshaf and Ilham. What
could they say about these men they thought they had known? Instead, they
talked up Hajiar, heaping praise on his philanthropy. I heard from a neighbor
about how, during Ramadan one year, he ran into Hajiar in the Maligawatta
market. “He was saying, ‘Ten kilograms of beef to this mosque; 10 kilograms to
that mosque,’ and I wondered how much he was spending.” I heard from his
relative, the spice merchant, about how when parts of Colombo flooded, Hajiar
didn’t care that millions of rupees’ worth of his spices were submerged. “He
didn’t even go to the warehouse,” the relative said. “He was here, packing
parcels of food and distributing them to the poor.” These stories were true,
but they were delivered with anxious eagerness, as though the people who knew
Hajiar were straining to offer compensation for the sins of his sons.
One
beneficiary of Hajiar’s generosity was the Colombo Grand Mosque, a polygonal
structure with a golden dome, on the next street over from Ishana. From 2015 to
2018, Hajiar served on the mosque’s board. He didn’t always make it to the
monthly meetings, but he was a ready source of funds, the mosque’s vice
president, ThawfeekZuhar, told me. “If we needed 25,000 rupees or whatever —
for electricity bills or other matters of finances — whenever we fell short,
he’d just pay.”
The Grand
Mosque is Sri Lanka’s oldest. When the Portuguese arrived in 1505, it is said,
the mosque had already been there for the better part of a millennium. Arabian
traders had visited and settled on the island since before the birth of Islam,
and the Moors — as these traders and their descendants came to be called —
married into the local population. They spoke Tamil as a practical language for
trading with South India and became the engine of Sri Lankan commerce.
Traveling through colonial Pettah in 1850, an Englishman named Henry Charles
Sirr was impressed by “the Moormen” who owned a string of shops and warehouses.
“Every imaginable commodity is here to be procured,” Sirr wrote, “from a lady’s
bonnet to a ship’s anchor, from a paper of pins to a marlin-spike, from a
bottle of pickles to a saddle, from a web of fine muslin to strong canvas for
sails.”
Despite
their long residence, Muslims always inhabited an interstitial space in Sri
Lanka’s demography. The island’s most prominent social divide is a linguistic
one, although ethnicity and religion map closely onto language. Seven out of 10
Sri Lankans are Buddhist, and they all speak Sinhalese, just as all the Hindus
speak Tamil; Christianity cuts across both language groups. Within this mosaic,
Muslims are a tile set askew. They make up 9.7 percent of the populace — not
the main minority but a secondary one. Their first language is Tamil, so they
can never be considered Sinhalese, and because they trace their ancestry to
Arab countries rather than India, they’re also held apart from ethnic Tamils.
Appropriately, the journalist Latheef Farook titled his book about Sri Lankan
Muslims “Nobody’s People.”
As a
result, Muslims have been burned from both directions. During the civil war,
they tried to maintain a low profile, until they were judged untrustworthy by
the Tigers. In 1990, in the northern towns the Tigers held, Muslims were told
to leave, sometimes with just a few hours’ notice. In the east, where the
Tigers also held territory, the guerrillas surrounded two mosques during Friday
prayers on an August evening the same year, shooting the men and boys inside,
killing 147 worshipers. After the Tigers were defeated in 2009, Sri Lanka’s
newly emboldened Buddhist nationalists trained their violence upon Muslims.
Right-wing groups attacked Muslim-owned shops, painted pigs on the walls of
mosques and tore down a shrine to an Islamic saint. In 2014 and 2018, riots
erupted in different parts of the country, during which Muslims and their
properties were targeted. The violence spread so fast that it seemed as if some
groups needed only the flimsiest excuse — a WhatsApp rumor of an incident miles
away — to torch or loot the nearest Muslim business.
From the
precariousness of their place in society, Muslims drew some axioms on how to be
model citizens. Stay on the good side of the state. Be moderate — something
that was, in any case, second nature to Sri Lanka’s Muslims, many of whom
follow the softened, syncretic customs of Sufism. Keep tightly within your
community. Give plentifully. Just as Hajiar followed the mercantile tradition
of generations of Muslims before him, so too did he abide by their collective
wisdom on how to live as a Muslim in Sri Lanka.
Mahawila
Gardens is laid out like a tuning fork, and the Ibrahims lived on the northern
tine, in a chalk-white three-story mansion with steel-railed balconies. On a
weekday morning last August, the house was mute and vacant; black-and-yellow
caution tape ran from a sapling on one side of the road to a drainage pipe on
the other, so that nobody could pass in front of the building. A lone policeman
was on duty, and we stood together and gazed at the house. There must be 10
rooms in there, he said, or maybe a dozen. He pointed to a window in the middle
floor. That was where Fatima triggered her bomb, killing not just herself and
her children but three policemen as well. A wooden shutter was hanging by a
single hinge; in the next row of windows, the glass was shattered. The white BMW
parked in front was smudged with soot. It seemed inconceivable that anyone
would wish to return to sponge down the car, repair the windows and begin to
live here again.
Hajiar and
his wife raised three daughters and six sons in this house, and I met one of
them: a young man with an unfailingly polite manner, who asked not to be
identified. He was worried about being pulled into detention for questioning,
as others had been. He sat on the edge of his chair, as if the pain of the past
few months wouldn’t permit him the respite of leaning back. His wife, next to
him, spoke very little, except when she couldn’t contain herself.
The
Ibrahims moved into their big white house in 1998, when Inshaf, the
second-oldest of the children, was finishing high school at the prestigious
D.S. Senanayake College. He was in the section of the school where lessons were
taught in Tamil, his brother remembered. “So he didn’t interact at all with the
Sinhalese boys. Only when they played sports, probably.” Ilham, the surly one,
attended Alexor International College, a school with a higher proportion of
Muslim pupils. They never had many friends, their brother said. “Just each
other.”
Others
noticed this as well. Mahawila Gardens is home to several Muslim families, and
every year for Avurudu, the Sri Lankan New Year, the young people threw a
celebratory dinner. The Ibrahim boys never attended. Some thought they were
proud of their wealth, or shy because of it. “Maybe they thought they wouldn’t
fit in,” said one neighbor who lived down the road. “They were very
self-conscious, not the kind to just let loose.” And people remarked upon the
differences in Inshaf and Ilham. Inshaf was good-looking and well built, a fine
student, always ready with a courteous smile; Ilham was shorter and a bit
chubby, not quite as smart and so reserved that even his father’s employees
thought him gruff. Everyone liked to say that they had known Inshaf and thought
the world of him; everyone was quick to add that they hadn’t known Ilham at
all.
The
Ibrahim family mansion in the Mahawila Gardens section of Colombo. Ilham’s
wife, Fatima, detonated her own suicide vest here as the police were closing
in.Credit...Mahesh Shantaram for The New York Times
------
It wasn’t
that Hajiar was too strict. As his son said, wryly: “He was too busy to be
strict. … Even after he came home in the evening, he was on the phone a lot,
talking to suppliers and so on.” And it wasn’t that the Ibrahims were pious in
a misanthropic way. Kadija was a very religious woman, the neighbour remembered
— barely seen outside the house, and when she was, her head was always covered.
Their brother said that Ilham took after their mother but that Inshaf was “only
a little more religious than average.”
“They never
smoked or drank,” his wife said. “They never went to clubs. And no girls. They
were real goodie-boys. They did nothing wrong — until they committed the worst
crime of all.”
Among the
Ibrahims, Hajiar was the most gregarious. He told his children that he learned,
when he first came to Colombo, how to interact with every type of person. You
have to be like a reed that can bend in difficult times and bounce back, he
told his sons. His custom was to sling an arm around the shoulders of the men
he knew or worked with and walk through the streets of Pettah in this manner.
On the top floor of his house, he built a hall where he held Ramadan dinners
for all of Mahawila Gardens. When his children married, he hosted banquets
where he served quail to his friends and family, and to the politicians and businessmen
who invariably attended.
After
school, Inshaf joined Ishana. He had Hajiar’s mind, his sense of trade and
money. When he was a teenager, he would buy watches — and once even a
motorcycle — and sell them to his friends at a profit. Ten years ago, he married
the daughter of a prominent Colombo jeweller. Then in 2012, he started a copper
business called Colossus, which bought scrap metal at auction, in the form of
disused telecom cables or electrical transformers. Colossus stripped out the
copper and cast it into eight-millimetre tubes for export. A manager at Ishana
remembered Inshaf as a terrific boss. He would organize cricket tournaments for
his staff: rent a ground, print team T-shirts and even go out to bat himself.
He paid workers bonuses for their weddings or during Ramadan. But he was also
prone to paternalistic self-righteousness. “We had an accountant, an older
man,” the manager said. “He would drink. He would smoke heavily. He was a
Muslim, but he didn’t go to the mosque. And he was always in debt.” Inshaf
frequently gave this wayward man advice. Mend your life. Stop drinking. Find
your way back to Islam.
Ilham
married, too. “Fatima, I think, was a religious scholar,” his brother said.
His wife
laughed scornfully. “She was not a scholar.”
“She’d
memorized the Quran, though.”
It proved
hard to put Ilham to work. He joined Ishana’s board, and Hajiar set him up in a
shop in the town of Kegalle to buy pepper and cloves from local farmers. But he
displayed faint enthusiasm for this job and contrived to be in Colombo most of
the time. Then Hajiar bought him a pepper estate in the hills in Matale, and
Ilham farmed it halfheartedly for a couple of years before giving it up. Hajiar
installed him as the treasurer of a small nongovernmental organization he
financed, but Ilham was eternally at loggerheads with his colleagues, and the
organization had to hire an assistant treasurer to do Ilham’s work for him. He
was “an absolute idiot,” one of Hajiar’s associates said of Ilham. Hajiar was
at his wits’ end trying to socialize Ilham, “because I think he realized there
was something wrong with this son.”
But what
that was, nobody could quite diagnose. Even as Inshaf and Ilham transformed
over the last five years, those closest to them felt mystified by their newly
severe religiosity. Their brother heard about the Easter Sunday attacks while
he was out, and a friend called to tell him that there had been trouble in
Mahawila Gardens. He called his father, but there was no reply, so he went to a
relative’s house nearby, just in time to watch on television as the police
surrounded his family’s home. Perhaps some of the terrorists had gone on the
run and holed up inside the house, he reasoned. Then, he said, he saw the news
about Inshaf and Ilham. He shook his head, nearly speechless with despair. “I’m
so angry with them,” he said. “They were traitors. We came up because of this
country, and they destroyed it.”
Inshaf
Ibrahim (right) with his father, Mohamed, at an awards ceremony in 2016.
------
One
afternoon, an employee rolled open the shutters to the Ishana office — then, as
now, closed indefinitely after the bombings — and took me in. Everything
smelled musty; the air-conditioning hadn’t been switched on in so long that its
remote control had to be thumped to make it work. In the office, with its weak
fluorescent lights and closed shutters, it could have been any hour of the day.
We sat in Hajiar’s cabin on the ground floor, next to a rack of prizes he’d
collected for his company. I remembered that one of the few photos of Inshaf to
emerge in the press showed him in a sharp gray suit, accepting an award on
Ishana’s behalf from a government minister. The two men are shaking hands;
behind them stands Hajiar, beaming.
Four years
ago, Inshaf and Ilham started to learn Arabic in Ishana’s conference room,
sitting around the long table with a tutor every Saturday. Arabic, they
believed, brought them closer to the Prophet, by enabling them to read the
Quran in its original language. The classes featured a third student: Abdul
Latheef Jameel Mohamed, the younger brother of one of the Ibrahims’ neighbors
in Mahawila Gardens. Jameel always wore a lush beard and a jubba, a long tunic
favored by Muslim men in the Middle East.
After
attending college in England, Jameel went home to Sri Lanka in 2006, then moved
to Melbourne for a postgraduate degree. During his four years there, he became
such an extremist that Australian counterterrorism authorities investigated him
for suspected links to ISIS. He returned to Colombo a scold, telling off his
family for not being sufficiently religious, for failing to abolish music from
their lives. He once persuaded his brother Hakeem, a tea trader, to take him
and another friend to Turkey, where Hakeem was attending an exposition. In
Turkey, Jameel’s friend vanished — absorbed into ISIS in Syria, Sri Lankan
intelligence later learned. After that, some members of Colombo’s Muslim
community warned the Criminal Investigation Department about Jameel. The C.I.D.
put Jameel on a watch list. If you were to get hold of CCTV footage from near
Jameel’s house, a source with knowledge of the investigation told me, you would
see the C.I.D.’s undercover department in action. The same people always seemed
to be hanging around Mahawila Gardens: a man hawking lottery tickets but never
really interested in selling any, or beggars keeping an eye on the house.
Jameel was
an eloquent fellow, prone to argument, said one person who spoke to him often.
He told me that Jameel considered any Muslim who accepted the Sri Lankan legal
system to be a kafir, a nonbeliever. One of his pet themes was the
vulnerability of Muslims in Sri Lanka, and when riots against Muslims occurred,
they stoked his outrage. The notion that the legal system will protect you is
nonsense, he would declare. So was the very idea of human rights and due
process.
An
intelligence official, who was newly retired when I met him and asked not to be
named because he was speaking about confidential investigations, said he came
into contact with Jameel in 2015. The official, also a Muslim, already knew
Hakeem, Jameel’s brother. “Hakeem wanted me to have a word with Jameel,” he
said, because “he was maintaining very rigid, extreme ideas.” When they first
met, in a mosque, Jameel spoke for four hours. “He was so good as a speaker!”
the official said. “Ooh, he was excellent! And he was trying to manipulate me.”
Now considering him a friend, Jameel gave the official a handbook on Wahhabism,
the strict strain of Islam that has put more Muslim women in veils and men in thick
beards. “He took me to bookshops that had no names and that stocked these kinds
of ideological books. He knew where to go to find such books, clearly.”
In 2014 or
2015, soon after returning from Australia, Jameel met the Ibrahims — most
likely in Mahawila Gardens, where he hung out at Hakeem’s house. Ilham and
Jameel took to each other: long chats in the mornings after prayers, upstairs
in Ilham’s room; long chats in the evenings, on the veranda; long chats as
Ilham drove up and down the avenue lining the ocean. Late one night, one of the
Ibrahims’ neighbors, out for a stroll, spotted Jameel and Ilham in a parked
car, crouched over laptops. The intelligence official thinks Jameel first
recruited the wayward Ilham — to a cause as yet indistinct, for an act as yet
undecided. Then, he said, they groomed Inshaf together.
Roping
families into acts of terror is a new pattern in the ISIS franchise model,
Hoffman, the insurgency scholar, told me. It happened in Barcelona in 2017,
when three sets of brothers participated in an attack; it happened in Indonesia
in 2018, when a family bombed three churches in Surabaya. “It’s a real,
problematic wrinkle,” Hoffman says, “because penetrating family networks
becomes impossible. What informant do you plant inside a family? What
suspicions can they arouse by consorting with one another?”
From 2015
onward, there are gaps in our knowledge of the Ibrahims. Intelligence officials
can only offer theories: about how, for instance, Jameel pulled the brothers
into the orbit of Zaharan Hashim, a preacher in eastern Sri Lanka who uploaded
fanatical videos to YouTube and whose followers once took up swords to assault
a Sufi rally. (Sufis are considered heretics by many Islamic conservatives.)
Zaharan was both a beneficiary and an agent of a well-studied trend that has,
for a couple of decades, been shaping Sri Lankan Islam. From Saudi Arabia, rich
patrons send money and clerics to build new mosques and seed Wahhabism. Well
before Easter, the authorities knew that Zaharan was kindling violence in the
name of orthodoxy; that he instigated the vandalism of Buddhist statues in the
town of Mawanella in 2018; that he most likely had links with quasi-militant
organizations outside the country, including in India. In January 2019,
following leads from Mawanella, the police found weapons and 220 pounds of
explosives on a farm in Wanathavilluwa, up the coast from Colombo. Intelligence
agencies in India and Sri Lanka warned the government that Zaharan was plotting
a suicide attack.
Only
afterward did they learn that Zaharan had possibly received an education in
terrorism in India; that he had set up safe houses in Sri Lanka to train his
men; that the money for at least one such house came from Inshaf. This house,
near Wanathavilluwa, was disguised as a poultry farm. “There was a lagoon on
one side,” the intelligence official said. “A direct run from South India. All
these explosives and chemicals could have come through that sea route.” A
brother of Zaharan’s built the bombs, The Wall Street Journal reported. He
taught himself bomb-making online, and although he lost fingers and damaged an
eye in these experiments, he learned enough to jury-rig triggers out of
washing-machine timers. A few days before Easter, they successfully blew up a
motorcycle. Somehow, Zaharan had rustled up a band of men, persuaded them to
incinerate their bodies and those of hundreds of others and furnished them with
the bombs to do it.
Zaharan was
pudgy and empty-eyed, with a habit of waggling his index finger as he raved and
yelled. His videos had barbaric green-screen backdrops: One showed a town on
fire, presumably during one of the riots against Muslims; another showed a
knife and a splatter of gore. There was nothing coded or subtle about what he
said. “Buddhist kafirs, we will come for you,” he said. “You will have to
scrape up your scattered bodies.”
Around
2017, Zaharan talked openly about supporting ISIS. “He pitched himself as an
ISIS representative in Sri Lanka, while putting forth very little evidence of
it,” says Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor in the School of
Religion at Queen’s University in Ontario and an ISIS specialist. It never
seemed as if ISIS were paying Sri Lanka any attention. Kabir Taneja, a fellow
at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, spent years lurking in ISIS
chat rooms as research for a book on ISIS in South Asia. “Sri Lanka was almost
never mentioned,” Taneja says. Analysts like Taneja believe that, like some
other ISIS-inspired attacks, these bombings weren’t a top-down directive.
Rather, Zaharan and his associates set themselves up as a satellite operation,
committing their acts in the caliphate’s name. In a report published last
September, the International Crisis Group called Zaharan “an extraordinary
outlier.” One outlier is all it takes.
But even if
Zaharan wasn’t being overseen directly by ISIS in Syria or Iraq, he may have
relied upon other forms of assistance. The bombings were too elaborate to have
been cobbled together locally, Hoffman says. “The expertise had to have been
acquired from somewhere else.” One possibility is that Zaharan was plugged into
an ISIS affiliate in the area. Hoffman singled out a node called ISIS Khorasan,
which adapts an old name for the region where Central Asia melds into South
Asia. This node, Hoffman says, is attached to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India,
and it’s likely that Sri Lanka falls into its purview.
ISIS
Khorasan splintered out of the Pakistani Taliban in 2015 — a few thousand
fighters who decided, as Taneja says, “that if you wear an ISIS T-shirt, you’ll
get a spotlight to fall on you.” The same year, an ISIS spokesman officially
recognized ISIS Khorasan as an arm of the caliphate. From 2015 to 2019, while
it was gathering influence and conducting attacks across Pakistan and Afghanistan,
ISIS Khorasan would most likely have had direct lines of communication with
ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Taneja says. Though it held little territory of its
own, ISIS Khorasan took on some of the caliphate’s traits, “urging South Asian
Muslims to come join them.”
Zaharan’s
connection with an ISIS node explains certain aspects of the bombings. The idea
to strike churches and hotels, for instance, might have been provided by an
ISIS network. When the police raided one of Zaharan ’s safe houses, they found
orange robes and white clothes — a clue that he might have initially schemed to
attack Buddhist gatherings. ISIS doesn’t care about that kind of local impact,
Amarasingam says. “For them, it’s always been tourists and Christians.” When I
first spoke to Taneja, last December, he thought it unlikely that ISIS Khorasan
had the ability to orchestrate an attack in Colombo. By June, he was less
certain of that; new research had shown that local ISIS nodes had more sway
than previously thought. The complexity of the bombs suggests that an
explosives specialist might have traveled in and out of Sri Lanka to advise
Zaharan and his crew, he says. “But how did they do this over months and months
without triggering a warning? Where did the money to finance this come from? These
are questions no one has answers to.”
The
Cinnamon Grand hotel in Colombo, where Inshaf Ibrahim detonated a bomb in a
restaurant in April 2019.Credit...Mahesh Shantaram for The New York Times
------
After the
bombings, there was a backlash against Muslims. In west-central Sri Lanka,
during a mid-May weekend, shops, houses and mosques were set afire or
vandalized. A Muslim-owned factory and its pasta-making equipment were
destroyed. One Muslim carpenter was stabbed to death in his workshop. Hundreds
of refugees from Pakistan and Afghanistan, forced out of their homes by hostile
landlords and threatening mobs, had to move for their own safety into
police-run camps. After a rumor spread that a Muslim doctor had sterilized
4,000 Buddhist women without their knowledge, he was held for two months under
an antiterrorism law.
The
presidential election was on the horizon, and the bombings made it vital for
politicians to style themselves as guarantors of national security. For four
months, the government banned the niqab, which some Muslim women wear to cover
their faces and bodies. A Buddhist monk, serving six years in prison for
contempt of court, received a presidential pardon and resumed his place among
the most vocal Buddhist militants in the country. The monk belonged to the
BoduBalaSena, a Buddhist nationalist group that began calling for an
exclusively Sinhalese government. “Muslims don’t love us,” a prominent priest
said. Don’t eat at Muslim-owned restaurants, he went on. “They have fed poison
to our people.” Days later, sharing a stage with this priest, President
Maithripala Sirisena said that Sri Lanka ought to heed its Buddhist clergy. You
will have heard what the priest said, Sirisena added. “I am not going to say
anything about it.”
From the
opposition, Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced his decision to run for president. He
had been the defense secretary until 2014 under the presidency of his brother,
Mahinda, and was accused of war crimes and extrajudicial assassinations. (Last
year, he faced two civil lawsuits in California courts — one by 11 Tamil and
Sinhalese people who accused Rajapaksa of ordering their torture, and another
by the daughter of a Sri Lankan journalist who was believed to have been murdered
on Rajapaksa’s instructions. Rajapaska has denied the charges; while
campaigning for the presidency, he called the lawsuits “a little distraction.”
After he won, he became immune to prosecution, so the plaintiffs dropped their
actions; they can still pursue them whenever he leaves office.) Sirisena was
too fond of talking about human rights and individual freedoms, Rajapaksa said,
promising to dismantle Islamist radicalism by mounting surveillance of Muslim
groups. In November, Rajapaksa won with a comfortable majority; the data showed
his popularity among Tamils and Muslims to be feeble. “The main message of the
election,” he told Agence France-Presse, “is that it was the Sinhalese majority
vote that allowed me to win.”
Rajapaksa
didn’t have time to make any sweeping moves before the coronavirus sent Sri
Lanka into lockdown. But he has managed to signal his approach to dissidents
and minorities. In February, when the government celebrated Independence Day,
Sri Lanka’s anthem was sung only in Sinhalese. A police officer who had been
investigating corruption and murder accusations against Rajapaksa and his
allies received death threats after the election and fled to Switzerland.
Rajapaksa named army officers accused of war crimes as his defense secretary and
his acting chief of defense; the second appointment was so egregious that the
Trump administration barred his entry into the United States. Human Rights
Watch reported that activists and the families of Tamils who “disappeared”
during the war are being intimidated and kept under surveillance.
The
pandemic provided cover for some of these actions. In mid-April, Hejaaz
Hizbullah, the lawyer who sometimes represented Hajiar, received a phone call
from someone claiming to be a health official. He was led to believe that an
A.T.M. he used might have been contaminated with the coronavirus and was asked
to wait at home for a testing team. Instead, the Criminal Investigation
Department arrived, searched his files without a warrant and subsequently
arrested him. A police representative told journalists that the Easter Sunday
investigations were being “reopened with a fresh approach” and that Hizbullah,
having known the Ibrahims, was suspected of involvement in the attacks. But an
outcry arose over the arrest; the International Commission of Jurists has
deemed it “arbitrary,” and Amnesty International accused the government of
targeting Hizbullah for “his professional work as a lawyer in various civil and
political rights cases.” For weeks after Hizbullah’s arrest, the C.I.D. didn’t
produce him before a magistrate, as required by law, and he was permitted to
meet at length with his lawyers only after long delays. One of Hizbullah’s
associates told me that the authorities cited worries over the spread of the
coronavirus as the reason to restrict access to him.
The
prospect of Rajapaksa’s presidency had deeply worried Sri Lanka’s Muslims. If
the past is any guide, he will cite terrorism as a reason to trample their
rights, giving them perpetual cause to doubt their safety. In this way, Zaharan
will earn for his community exactly the sort of victimization he vowed to
avenge, and the state will sow the ground for exactly the sort of extremism it
vows to uproot.
To get the
Ibrahim brothers to enact their suicidal violence, Zaharan must have convinced
them of two things. The first was the importance of being uncompromising in
their religious practice. The second was the notion that in Sri Lanka, Islam
would wither away if its defenders didn’t fight for it. The riots against
Muslims in 2018, in the midst of the Ibrahims’ radicalization, fanned that
belief further. But even from here, the men had to traverse a final, moral
distance to justify to themselves the slaughter of innocent people. How they
did that is unknown, unknowable.
The
Shangri-La Hotel (right) in Colombo, where Inshaf Ibrahim’s younger brother,
Ilham, detonated a bomb the same morning. Credit...Mahesh Shantaram for The New
York Times
------
Around
2016, Ilham took his two oldest children out of school and taught them at home,
and, although they weren’t quite old enough to pray, he took them to the mosque
every evening. He began to parrot Jameel’s words, arguing that only God could
frame the law for Muslims. (“Don’t follow the highway code then!” one
interlocutor shot back in exasperation.) Ilham kept asking one brother, an
atheist, to return to prayer and fast during Ramadan, then severed ties with
him entirely. Ilham also stopped talking to his 93-year-old grandmother, who
argued with him about his new rigidities. You’re wasting your time, Hajiar told
him heatedly. You have to do things in proportion. Your workers out there at
the pepper farm have nothing to eat but stones, and you’re here talking about
religion.
Inshaf also
grew out his beard, and he, too, stopped speaking to his atheist brother. In
2018, the brothers quit Ishana’s board. Inshaf had always been uneasy with
Hajiar taking out bank loans, because earning interest conflicts with Islamic
strictures. But since 2016, he and Ilham grew more insistent, pressing Hajiar
to stop borrowing money. As a director, Inshaf signed loan documents; he was
worried that “for signing them, he’d have to answer to Allah,” the Ishana
manager said. But Hajiar refused. He was a pragmatic man who liked the handsome
returns from real estate, and he needed some leverage from time to time. Inshaf
saw this as unnecessary greed. He ran his copper factory without any loans.
His staff
found that he had become fond of moralizing. He talked about the path to
heaven, about the principles of Islam. Late in 2018, he pressed copies of a
book upon some employees, saying it held the truest account of the Prophet’s
life. In a plastic crate near Inshaf’s desk, I noticed five volumes he hadn’t
managed to give away. They were still in cellophane wrapping, sealed with their
price tags still visible. In the conference room, I was shown more than 200
other books, a small seminary’s worth. “He bought all these over the last three
years,” the manager said, laying some of the English titles out upon the table:
“Islamic Verdicts on the Pillars of Islam,” “In Pursuit of Allah’s Pleasure,”
“The Hardness of the Heart.”
For those
who knew Inshaf well, it would have been impossible to interpret this piety as
preparation for a suicide bombing. In curious ways, he still appeared to be a
man living for the future. He renovated the Colossus factory during this time:
more office space, better furniture, new machinery that arrived in February
2019. Well in advance, he booked a trip for his family to Mecca, to be there
for the end of Ramadan in early June. It was as if he was denying what he had
planned for himself, or as if one part of his life was progressing through
sheer inertia even as he was coldly calculating the other. A few weeks before
Easter, he transferred the ownership of his house and factory to his wife
without her knowledge, the Ishana manager told me. In his last year, Inshaf’s
routine transformed. He rarely went to Ishana and went to Colossus just for two
or three hours daily. Instead, he took his children to school and picked them
up; he spent his mornings with his wife, his afternoons with his children and
his evenings with his mother, like a man who knew that he was running out of
time.
On
Wednesday, April 17, around the start of the pepper-harvest season, the
intelligence official ran into Inshaf at a mosque. How’s business? he asked.
Inshaf replied that he was headed to Zambia for work.
On Thursday
evening, Inshaf went by Old Moor Street. He had bought a new car, a Mitsubishi
Montero, for 34 million rupees, and it was delivered that day. He parked
outside the office but didn’t go in; instead, an employee came out to collect
the car’s documents and to bring him a batch of 10 blank checks to sign. He
always did this when he left the country, in case expenses had to be met.
Inshaf took some cash as well, which he put into a bag and stowed in the car’s
trunk. It was a new bag, the employee noticed — a knapsack.
On Friday,
Inshaf’s wife rode with him to the Colombo airport to see him off to Zambia. A
report in The Sun in Britain claimed that, unusually, he held his wife’s head
and said, “Be strong.” Then, having pretended to catch his flight, he doubled
back to Colombo and joined Zaharan, Jameel, Ilham and at least four other men
in an apartment in the center of the city.
The next
day, around 1 in the afternoon, Inshaf checked into Room 425 in the Cinnamon
Grand. He provided a fake name, Mohamed Mubarak Mohamed Azzam, and a fake
address: 138/B New Moor Street. Later, he left the hotel, presumably to go back
to the apartment to join his collaborators. He didn’t return to the Cinnamon
Grand until 7:07 a.m. on Sunday, when a small blue car dropped him off at the
hotel.
Which means
he had almost two hours in his room that morning, by himself: long enough to
look at his backpack and its contents, think about his wife, children and
parents and pull out of his monstrous mission. He could have fled the hotel,
chucked his bomb into the sea and gone home to grieve his brother and support
his father. With time, he might have resumed his life: the copper business, the
cricket games, the community dinners during Ramadan. But perhaps he thought
that he had already gone too far, that there could never be any normalcy for
him even if he left. Or perhaps he never considered any of this at all.
Shortly
before 9 a.m., Inshaf left his room wearing a baseball cap and carrying his
knapsack. He made his way to the ground floor and passed through the atrium,
where giant urnlike lamps lit the space like beacons. He descended the
staircase to Taprobane, gave his room number at the entrance and walked into
the breakfast buffet.
Original
Headline: Two Wealthy Sri Lankan Brothers Became Suicide Bombers. But Why?
Source: The New York Times
URL: https://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/wealthy-sri-lankan-brothers-moderate/d/122298
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