Rescue us: Mumbai youth who joined ISIS now want to return home

The four Kalyan youth recruited by the Islamic State (ISIS) including 23-year-old Arif Majeed, who until now was believed to have been killed while fighting for ISIS in Syria, reportedly want to now return back to India. A Union Home Ministry source told Hindustan Times that the four youth got in touch with their family members expressing a wish to be rescued. The father of one of the youth reportedly contacted National Investigation Agency (NIA) officials and sought their help in rescuing his son from Turkey, reported HT. However, it seems the government may not be able to do much given the circumstances. A senior intelligence official told the Times of India that the government is willing to take a sympathetic view on the matter, but he said that it was virtually impossible to negotiate the return of a person associated with a globally proscribed outfit. [caption id=“attachment_1810067” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Protests against ISIS. AFP.[/caption] Recently, reports said, that the  jihadist movement in Syria and Iraq reportedly attracted a lot of youngsters. The HT report noted that the Indian security agencies identified about 10 Muslim youngsters who left lucrative jobs to fight and establish a pan-Islamic caliphate. “Apart from four youngsters from Kalyan, near Mumbai, who are believed to be fighting alongside Islamic State of Syria and Levant (ISIS) terrorists, a Kerala youth studying in Dubai and a Hyderabad student from Texas have joined Islamist fighters in Syria,” noted the report. Four youth, Fahad Sheikh, Arif Majeed, Shaheen Tanki and Aman Tandel had left for Iraq on 25 May claiming they were headed for a pilgrimage. Next day, Arif’s father discovered a note from his son saying he had left to join jihadists in Iraq. Fahad, an engineer, had actually landed a job in Bandra two days before leaving. He told his family he was going to work and never returned, his family told the  Indian Express, unable to fathom why their son took such an extreme step. Where the radicalisation of Indian Muslim youth is concerned, a recent report by the National Investigating Agency (NIA) has said that more than 300 Indian youth have been recruited by Pakistan-based Tehreek-e-Taliban and this group has joined hands with ISIL in Iraq. As Firstpost columnist Debobrat Ghose had noted while quoting an intelligence source, “Whether more than 300 youth were recruited on Indian soil for ISIS or its allied outfits is yet to be confirmed, but it can be said with certainty that Islamic terror outfits have gradually made inroads in the non-Hindi states, especially southern and western states, for recruiting young Muslims to fight in Afghanistan, Syria etc. in the name of Jihad.” Ghose pointed out that Majeed’s case has punctured the commonly held belief that it’s only the impoverished, illiterate, socially marginalized Muslim youth who join terror outfits or become easy prey to their recruiters.