NEW DELHI: An expert who has been researching ISIS for years, author Kabir Taneja has recently come out with The ISIS Peril: The World’s most feared Terror Group and its Shadow on South Asia.
The book talks in details about the historical, cultural and political rise of the ISIS in India as also the psyche behind the men who are a part of the outfit.
Currently an Associate Fellow with the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), his work focuses on India’s relations with the Middle East, specifically looking at the security dimensions raised by transnational jihadist groups.
“One of the shortcomings of our understanding of ISIS in India, in fact in the whole of South Asia, is that neither the media nor the public discourse seems to know what exactly ISIS is,” he says.
What prompted you to write The ISIS Peril?
ISIS’s physical and virtual caliphates have managed to create a brand of terror, at a pace that has never been witnessed before. South Asia, in general, was not covered properly on this issue, and the fact that a country such as India was not a major provider of fighters to ISIS, and in fact is a story where ISIS failed, was perhaps needed to be told and understood.
How did you go about researching this book?
I was a journalist when in 2014 the now-deceased ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had announced the setting up of the Islamic State from Al Nouri mosque in Mosul, Iraq. It is rare to witness such a strong and fast rise of a terror group compared to what ISIS had achieved between 2014 and 2016. And in this age of technology, ISIS was using the online world as efficiently as offline. This gave rare access to ISIS sympathisers online on social media, and most of what ISIS was doing was being marketed online. It was all available in real-time, if you knew where to look.
This allowed a lot of material to be collected for the book. Along with that, talks, mails and chats with law enforcement and intelligence officials on the same added more layers to how India was working to counter this new threat. Any interesting anecdote you would like to share...In one instance, an ISIS sympathiser on Telegram app contested one of my facts that I thought I had correct on ISIS hierarchy. He offered to proof read my writing and correct it, which he did. That person, correctly pointed out that I was factually wrong on one account. So, an anonymous pro-ISIS sympathiser, in fact, ended up copy correcting a paragraph of this book.
What makes you say that ISIS is the most feared terror group? Any examples?
All of an ISIS is an example of that. More than the violence, and the kind of violence, it’s the ISIS brand which became dangerous, gaining even more notoriety than the likes of Al Qaeda. For example, in one case, it took one militant to kill a policeman in Kashmir and ask ISIS to stake claim by emailing them. ISIS took note, took claim and suddenly militant was attributed as an ISIS fighter, a narrative which was then played out across national media. One random militant. One random act. It’s in the brand.
You say there is little understanding about ISIS in India, even South Asia.
What do you think should be done to increase the knowledge base?
There needs to be better exchange of knowledge and information across South Asian countries. We often talk about intelligence and knowledge sharing with the West, but at the moment we are drastically failing on this within our neighbourhood. We have to start with better relations within the South Asian states.