As the people and government of Sri Lanka reel with shock and grief in the wake of the extraordinarily devastating suicide bomb attacks over the Easter weekend they are forced to confront some important lessons. And whilst the horrors of the attacks are uniquely personal to the people of Sri Lanka the challenges that they present go well beyond the island nation.
Tuesday’s belated claim by the Islamic State (IS) movement (presumably delayed by ongoing police operations), that it was responsible for the attacks came as no real surprise. As soon as the magnitude of what had happened on Sunday was revealed it was clear that this was not just the work of local hateful extremists turned terrorists. Nor was the targeting of Christians and foreigners something that made sense within the local context of Sri Lankan society. It was all but inevitable that the attacks were in large part the work of an international terrorist movement.
The Easter attacks do not appear to be an organic product of problems within Sri Lankan society. Sri Lanka's Muslim and Christian minorities have long suffered together both from the Tamil Tigers and more recently from resurgent Buddhist extremists.
At a time when IS is doubling-down on its push for a global insurgency whilst al-Qaeda has shifted policy and turned away from large-scale indiscriminate attacks out of concern for building its reputation vis-à-vis its breakaway rival IS, there seems little reason to doubt the involvement of IS.
Consequently, the question is not just what went wrong in Sri Lanka but what do the attacks say about the intentions of IS in this post-caliphate phase?
It is not clear precisely what role returning foreign fighters from Syria played in preparing the attacks in Sri Lanka. What is known is that at least 40, and perhaps many more, Sri Lankans travelled to Syria to fight with IS and an unknown number have returned. At the same time, the small IS support community in Sri Lanka appears to be involved with like-minded extremists across South Asia, including in the Maldives, India, Bangladesh and possibly Afghanistan.
It was the Indian intelligence agency RAW who first raised the alarm about a possible terrorist plot in Sri Lanka.
Vital intelligence must be shared
Over the past few months they briefed Sri Lankan security officials about their concerns that Zahran Hashmi, the leader of the hateful extremist group National Thowheeth Jamath (NTJ), was preparing for a major terrorist attack. They had intercepted communications, had extensive interrogation notes and a trove of documents.
The first lesson from the Easter attacks is that passing on vital intelligence is not sufficient unless it is shared and acted upon by those in power. A bitter rivalry between Sri Lanka's President Maihtripala Sirisena, and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has compounded problems. This rivalry resulted in a constitutional crisis last October when the president attempted to fire Wickremesinghe and replace him with former president and prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa. It has led to the dangerous dynamics in which the prime minister and key ministers have been excluded from security briefings. At the same time Sirisena accused India’s RAW of interfering in Sri Lankan affairs, even going so far as to say that RAW was plotting to assassinate him.
Sri Lanka has done well to recover from the quarter-century-long bloody civil war that ended just over a decade ago. But it has struggled to rebuild political health and stability. Mahinda Rajapaksa, who led the military defeat of the Tamil Tiger insurgency in 2009, has fought hard to stay at the apex of power. Transitioning from the role of prime minister to president and then returning to the legislature he had hoped to return to the prime ministership after the intervention of his friend last October. Speculation is now rife that Mahinda intends for his brother Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, who served alongside him as Defence Secretary, to contest the national elections at the end of the year.
The long struggle against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) insurgency produced a military and security sector with considerable capacity but also one burdened by a fixation on the struggles of the past. So concerned was it with fighting the last war that the security sector struggled to conceive of the possibility of jihadi terrorism emerging in the island state where it had never had supportive presence in the past.
Consequently, despite receiving detailed intelligence from RAW there was a level of denial that interfered with the security sector's capacity to properly acknowledge the danger facing them. At the same time the political infighting and associated mistrust of RAW meant that vital information was not shared in a timely fashion and that too much attention was paid to political point-scoring rather than dealing with a rapidly developing threat.
Recognising the opportunity that the political chaos in Sri Lanka presented it with IS appears to have worked quickly and effectively with a small group of extremists, assisted by those who had travelled to fight within Syria, to turn an inconsequential hateful extremist movement into a band of terrorists willing to give the lives of themselves and their families to the cause.
In other words, Sri Lanka was chosen as a soft target of opportunity. In many other parts of the world it would have been difficult to pull off such an ambitious large-scale co-ordinated attack without triggering intelligence warnings and intervention from security services. Indeed, such multi-actor attacks are relatively rare precisely because they are so difficult to bring to completion without being found out and interrupted.
Conditions in Sri Lanka represented a perfect storm of political failure, denial, and lack of appropriate capacity. The good news is that these perfect storm conditions are unlikely to be repeated again, a least provided that Sri Lanka pulls together at a social and community level in unity and gets through the end-of-year elections without allowing the attacks to be used to push further division.
There is, of course, a danger that if forces aligned with the Rajapaksa brothers come to power at the end of the year and use the attacks to justify returning to a heavy-handed military approach to security that was seen to be decisive in winning the civil war insurgency a decade ago that Sri Lanka's terrorist problem may continue to grow rather than be nipped in the bud.
If, however, Sri Lanka can come through this current period of trial stronger and more unified then IS and the extremism that it represents will not be given an opportunity to put-down deeper roots into Sri Lankan soil.
The rest of Asia needs to take note
Nevertheless, even if Sri Lanka rises to the challenge and comes through it fortified against the pernicious influences of IS, and the circumstances that allow it to thrive, the rest of Asia needs to take note.
The opportunistic, surgical intervention into Sri Lanka has allowed IS to execute one of its deadliest terrorist attacks of all time. With at least 359 killed and more than 500 injured, the Easter attacks were twice as deadly as the al-Qaeda attacks in the decade following the unprecedented November 11 attacks of 2001.
What occurred fits exactly with what is known about IS’s post-caliphate intentions. IS began as al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2004 and came to be the dominant insurgency movement post the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After being almost eliminated following the death of its founder Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006 and the success of the Sunni awakening in Anbar province in 2007 and 2008 the movement roared back to life and expanded dramatically after the outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011 and the drawdown of US troops at the end of that year. And whilst it became fixated with establishing a physical caliphate, IS was born out of insurgency and increasingly began to conceive of itself as a global insurgent movement.
By 2019 IS lost final territorial control but continues to drive an active insurgency in northern Iraq with as many as 20,000 fighters, with many of its key leaders and fighters having survived the collapse of the caliphate. At the same time, it has increasingly focused efforts on inspiring and directing local insurgencies across Africa the Middle East and Asia. In this it has achieved notable success, including in our region with the five-month long siege of Marawi in the southern Philippines in 2017.
What the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka reinforce is that IS is committed to opportunistically seeking out vulnerable states in which to flip local grievances into subcontracted terror campaigns in its name.
To understand what is at stake it is important to recognise the extraordinary technical and logistical achievements that the Easter attacks represent. IS’s ability to be able to pull off such a massive set of co-ordinated terror attacks with such a large death toll has been many years in the making.
The surprising declaration of the IS caliphate in mid 2014 saw a dramatic increase in the frequency and intensity of terror attacks. Born out of insurgency in 2004 IS terrorist attacks were focused first in Iraq and then extended to Syria. The vast majority of IS attacks continued to carried out in conflict zones (Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and, more recently, the southern Philippines). This pattern was sustained throughout the almost five years that IS held territory.
A number of significant attacks, however, were conducted well beyond the battle field: 2014 saw four such attacks, 2015 16 attacks, 2016 22 attacks, 2017 18 attacks, and 2018 10 attacks. The vast majority of these attacks, however, were conducted by lone actors. The exception to this being larger co-ordinated attacks in Bardo and Sousse in Tunisa, Sham el-Sheikh, Ankara, Beirut, and Paris in 2015.
Then Istanbul, Jakarta, al-Hofuf (Saudi Arabia), Brussels, Aktobe (Kazakhstan), Istanbul and Dhaka, in 2016. Followed by significant attacks in Istanbul, and Tanta and Alexandria and the Sinai (Egypt) in 2017 and Surabaya in 2018.
Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia are vulnerable
If, as is to be hoped and expected, Sri Lanka learns the hard lessons from the Easter attacks and closes the door on significant ongoing IS infiltration, its neighbours in South Asia, in particular the Maldives, India and Bangladesh, share many of the same vulnerabilities that were revealed in the Sri Lankan attacks.
It was only after the July 1, 2016, attack on the Holey Artisan bakery in the diplomatic quarter of Dhaka that Bangladesh began to acknowledge the extent to which local extremist networks had been infiltrated by transnational networks. Even so, Bangladesh continues to face challenges with extensive extremist networks and lack of police and intelligence capacity to deal with them.
India has a very capable intelligence service and is on guard about the spread of IS influence but its police force is overworked and severely lacking in capacity and many of India's political and social policies play into the hands of Islamist extremists.
There are reasons to be concerned about political and social circumstances in Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia that leave them vulnerable to IS interventions. In each of these three Southeast Asian states there is a level of denial about the extent to which global jihadi terrorism of the kind championed by IS represents a potential problem.
In Thailand and the Philippines there is a tendency to see Islamist terrorism is a problem confined to restless southern provinces and local grievances.
Politics in Malaysia have strengthened with the democratic correction that came in the 2018 election but a dangerous level of denial exists about the imminent threat of IS style terrorist attacks. Special Branch have been extraordinarily effective in interrupting multiple plots linked to IS over the last four years. But perversely, this very success has reinforced a sense within the broader government apparatus and leadership that Malaysia doesn't face any immediate threats that it can't deal with.
Finally, there is another lesson to be taken from the Sri Lankan attacks which applies everywhere including within Australia. And that is that we can no longer assume that hateful extremism will forever be separate from violent extremism. This is one lesson shared in common with the Christchurch attacks. Most hateful extremists never become terrorists, but some will. And unless we pay more attention to hateful extremism we will continue to be caught by surprise.
Credit: This article was first published on 26 April 2019 by the Australian Financial Review.
