The rise of al-Qaida offshoot Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) may look like a distant problem affecting the Middle East with Indians merely caught in the crossfire. But it's a danger far closer home than it appears.
Security establishment sources said ISIS, which is being suspected to be behind the kidnapping of 40 Indians in Mosul, has global ambitions and aims to create an Islamic World Dominion of which even India would be a part. A recently released world dominion map by the outfit had parts of north-west India, including Gujarat, shown as part of the Islamic state of Khorasan, a caliphate that the outfit aims to achieve.
Sources said there were inputs of jihadists from India fighting in both Iraq and Syria and some of these would eventually return. They would then become the link between the Middle East outfits and the Indian subcontinent. That is a time, sources said, India needs to prepare for. Already, the outfit is being touted as the most efficient, organized, dangerous and ambitious terror outfit in the world.
Even al-Qaida, which has terrorized the world for over two decades and is the estranged ideological guru of the outfit, looks a pale shadow in front of ISIS given the quick advances it has made in a short time. With India on its radar, even if distant, the signs are not good, sources said. Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management, said,
"Strategy is a function of capability. We are not focusing on events in the Middle East because we have no capability to influence them.
Earlier too, people have been kidnapped in the region and we have had to depend on third party negotiators. All global jihad will have India in its crosshairs.
We can ignore them only at our own peril." Sahni specifically warned of the threat from Indian jihadis fighting in Iraq and Syria.
"These are battlehardened terrorists who will one day come back. Moreover, their antics and successes will inspire many more here as we already see them drawing inspiration from events abroad," he said. The growing ambition of ISIS can be gauged from the fact that from a small group owing allegiance to al-Qaida, it took the shape of Islamic State in Iraq in 2006. Within years, as the Syrian crisis escalated, it metamorphosed into Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and is now known as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The addition of the word Levant expands the group's aim to capture Syria, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus and parts of Turkey.
ISIS has designs on India: Experts - The Times of India
) they will wipe off these scums from the face of the earth
.
??
