Terrorism in Sri Lanka & South Asia.

Islamic State’s leadership had long prepared for this new phase of its existence. Before he was killed in a drone strike, IS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani said the loss of territory would not spell the group's end.

Having lost its physical caliphate, IS has made it a point to prove its continued ability to inspire & orchestrate brutal attacks around the world, which puts it in a category of its own. IS continues to demonstrate a more lethal power of persuasion than Al-Qaeda & other Jihadist groups. It has adapted quickly to setbacks & increasingly using the tools of globalization (Bitcoin & encrypted communications) to take its fight underground & rally adherents around the world.

It is no coincidence that the deadliest terror organizations in the world are also the wealthiest as financial means are essential for terrorist organizations. IS's financial strength is unassailable with estimates of its wealth between $50 - $300 million & other estimates even higher. The revenues of the Caliphate have been invested in legitimate businesses & laundered through banks & money lenders.

IS clearly has ample funds, military know-how & still tens of thousands of experienced foreign fighters on call. There were roughly 40,000 fighters from more than 120 countries who joined IS in battle since 2014. Among them were at least 40 Sri Lankans. It is believed that thousands of these foreign fighters managed to escape to fight another day as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) closed in on their positions in Syria & Iraq. Many of them are attempting or have returned home. Beyond these battle-hardened survivors, there are plenty of IS sympathizers sustained by online radicalization & extremist preachers. The presence of foreign fighters from Sri Lanka could explain how IS is able to build vital personal links in the small community of Sri Lankan Islamist extremists. At this point, the precise involvement of returnees from Syria & foreign IS supporters in the deadly Easter Sunday attacks remains under investigation.

IS involvement in the Easter Sunday attacks

A series of coordinated blasts at high-value targets & the targeting of Catholic churches fit an all-too-familiar pattern of IS attacks on Christians, along with fellow Muslims. Although IS’s precise role in Easter Sunday’s attacks is still unclear, terrorism experts agree that it is highly unlikely that small relatively unknown Islamist groups in Sri Lanka would be able to plan & execute a complex attack using a large amount of reliable explosives (Dynamite) on multiple targets without some kind of assistance from a larger & more experienced foreign group. The complex attack would have been a test for the organizational & logistical capabilities of any extremist group.

The Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka have demonstrated that territorial loss has not diminished IS’s reach. IS central is seemingly still capable of organizing & directing attacks far from its heartland. It has rebranded itself as a global insurgency & is exporting its expertise in bomb-making, fund-raising & recruitment far beyond what was its core territory. The terror group’s attraction remains potent & it is making use of local groups & exploiting grievances.

The major terrorist groups are increasingly hijacking local conflicts to extend global jihad to different parts of the world. The Uighur conflict in China's western Xinjiang province & the Rohingya conflict in Myanmar are just 2 examples. In both these cases, global jihadist organisations sought to adopt local issues to broaden their support. IS & Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) are increasingly active in South Asia where political tensions often cross religious lines. Terror groups want sectarian violence it can further exploit. Their affiliates are focussing on countries other than Afghanistan & Pakistan, where they are already quite strong. There is some evidence to suggest that IS sees India as promising territory & is intent on aggravating Muslim-Hindu tensions there. Other terrorists have returned to Jordan & Saudi Arabia, where there was an IS-inspired attack on the Saudi General Directorate of Investigation’s Center in al-Zulfi suburb around 250 km north of Riyadh on Easter Sunday. Clearly, religious extremism is growing throughout South Asia & Easter Sunday's attacks could have been triggered by the conflict between Buddhists & Muslims.

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has a long history of ethnic conflict between the government & militant groups like the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) & the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). Sri Lankan militant groups have a long history of linking up with international terror organisations. The necessity of generating funds prompted even separatist groups like the LTTE to seek outside help.

After the civil war with the LTTE ended in 2009, militant Buddhism began to surge. Hard-line Buddhist monks targeted churches & mosques, priests & imams, often with the tacit support of the security services. While Muslims bore the brunt of these attacks, Christians suffered too & the 2 communities were essentially on the same side. But that informal alliance was seriously challenged by Sunday’s attacks, which the authorities say were carried out by Muslim extremists, primarily against Christians. In recent years, Sri Lanka has witnessed a spate of anti-Muslim violence linked to ultra-nationalist Sinhalese Buddhist groups. In February 2018 in the eastern district of Ampara, 2 mosques & dozens of homes, small businesses & vehicles were destroyed. Authorities did arrest several suspects but concerns remained about police inaction during the violence.

Ties between the majority Buddhist community & the Muslim minority have been tense for the past few years. Sri Lanka is a Buddhist-majority country, with just 6% of the population adhering to the Catholic faith & Muslims making up another 10% of the total population. Muslims in Sri Lanka have voiced concerns about a growing number of anti-Muslim protests & attacks, carried out by hardline Buddhist groups. Although Sri Lanka was ravaged by decades of Tamil separatist insurgency that was crushed militarily in 2009, the country has little history of Islamist violence.

Sri Lanka has turned into one of the most popular tourist destinations in the last 10 years with tremendous efforts from the government. Such devastating terrorist attacks promised international attention. Sri Lanka was a soft target. Having successfully defeated the LTTE a decade ago through military might, it had become complacent. It has not seen a pressing need to develop police & non-military intelligence capacities to counter shifting security threats. 10 years of peace had bred over-confidence. The military had been more focussed on monitoring the country’s Tamil population & preventing another separatist insurgency than on a Muslim community that constituted only 10% of the population. The government & military were essentially asleep. This serious lack of preparedness was a significant factor that led to a little-known Islamist group being able to orchestrate the deadliest attack of its kind in South Asia. The resources & manpower needed for an attack of this magnitude are significant. Local terror groups are simply not capable of independently mounting an attack of this scale & complexity.

The Sri Lankan government has admitted to receiving prior warnings from Indian intelligence officials about impending attacks on churches, but these were not shared across agencies. India had provided very specific intelligence inputs to Sri Lankan security officials about that attacks, including names of perpetrators, their modus operandi & movement of terrorists & places which were targeted on Easter Sunday. Sri Lanka had probably refused to pay heed to India’s alert on possible suicide attacks & the involvement of extremists based on its belief that New Delhi is trying to pit Colombo against Pakistan by pointing fingers at the island's Muslim community. The Sri Lankan security apparatus was also apparently casual with the Indian alert as they did not comprehend any threat from jihadists after defeating the LTTE.

This glaring security failure highlighted the sheer inefficiency of the present government. Some of the responses provided by the President, the Prime Minister & state-officials, in the immediate aftermath, were ridiculous. The President & the Prime Minister were in a bitter feud. Both President Maithripala Sirisena, who is also the Minister of Defense & in charge of national police & Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who has been kept out of high-level security meetings since Sirisena tried to oust him last fall, said they only learned about the plot after it had been carried out. Sri Lanka has a deeply divided, weak & fragile government, which emboldened terrorist movements.

The Easter Sunday attacks

On April 21, 2019, 3 Catholic churches & 3 high-end hotels in Colombo were near simultaneously attacked by suicide bombers which resulted in the death of hundreds of people including several foreign nationals. The explosions maimed hundreds more. The deadliest explosion was at St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, where more than 100 people were killed. At least 28 people were killed at the Zion Church in Batticaloa, on the other side of the island on its eastern coast. St. Anthony’s Shrine, a Roman Catholic church in Colombo, was also attacked, with an unknown number of dead. It was later revealed that the attackers were from the Muslim community. The sites of the attack had also been chosen with great care so as to garner international attention. A coordinated blast on Easter has massive religious ramifications as well.

(Footage shows the suspected bomber calmly walking towards St Sebastian's church)

The terrorists wanted to kill as many people as possible on Easter Sunday with their PBIEDs when they targeted large numbers of people attending mass. The churches targeted were relatively small structures with large numbers of people to produce a higher impact. The targets selected were “Western” in nature because the Church & Christianity were Western inductions. The high-end hotels targeted, especially the Shangri-La Hotel & Kingsbury, are frequented mostly by Western visitors & tourists, although one can find Sri Lanka’s super-rich in these spots. Hence, these were attacks on the “West” & viewed as a justifiable act of revenge for the Christchurch massacre of March 2019.

(Collecting body parts after the IEDs exploded)

The Aftermath

The long-anticipated claim of responsibility for the attacks was made by IS on Tuesday night, 23 April 2019. A day after IS claimed responsibility for killing more than 250 people, Muslims in some areas of Sri Lanka faced a backlash. Muslims are now afraid & resentful as ethnic divide deepens in Sri Lanka. Resentment is also building because Muslims believed their community is being unfairly targeted, even though the government was warned repeatedly about possible attacks. Muslim community leaders said they had for years, repeatedly warned the authorities about the potential for extremist violence growing within the community, including from the preachings of the alleged leader of the Easter Sunday attacks, Zahran Hashim. A ban on facial veils & house-to-house searches by security forces in Muslim-majority neighbourhoods across the country have added to the distrust.

A week after the attack, on April 29, Baghdadi himself acclaimed the Sri Lanka operation. Baghdadi’s intervention put to rest any doubts about the IS connection to the Sri Lankan Easter Sunday massacre. The killing more than 250 people at churches & hotels is one of the terror group’s deadliest attack outside the borders of Iraq & Syria. The Sri Lanka bombings exceeded all but the September 11 attacks in sophistication & deadliness. The perpetrators, National Thowheeth Jama'ath (NTJ) were previously known only for acts of hateful vandalism. In the weeks since, Sri Lankan officials have steadily built a case that the attackers had multiple connections to IS.

There are seemingly a few terrorist cells operating in different parts of the country. In Colombo, navy personnel detained 3 suspects along with 1 kg of C4 explosive when they were hiding in a 3-wheeler near the Wellawatte train station. In Sammanthurai, 40 km away from Batticaloa, where one of the Easter Sunday bombs went off at Zion Church, security forces recovered a huge stash of explosives, detonators, 200 gelignite sticks, acid bottles, 40 metres of detonator cord, weapons, IS flags & banner, suicide kits & military uniforms from a safe house. In Kalmunai, a Muslim-majority municipality in the country, a joint operation by the Sri Lanka Army, Special Task Force & local police resulted in a shoot-out which lasted over 2 hours when the joint operation team rushed to Nintavur area after hearing an explosion behind a mosque. When the security team reached the spot, suspected terrorists hiding inside the house opened fire. 2 suspected terrorists were killed in the ensuing gun battle with 6 killed in the entire operation.

Groups like IS are transparent in their intention to divide society, supporting the notion that violence is the only option to achieve their objectives. With each tit-for-tat response, tensions mount among the population & the damage to social cohesion becomes even more challenging to address in the long-term. Escalating sectarian violence plays directly into the narrative pushed by extremists on all sides, both locally & transnationally. The slaughter of hundreds of innocent men, women & children at hotels & churches on Easter Sunday has stirred religious hatred in Sri Lanka. The reprisals against the Muslim community were swift & brutal. Mobs used gasoline bombs to burn more than 500 shops, houses & places of worship in a single day. In some cases, the attackers were transported to villages & towns where local Buddhists directed them to the homes of Muslims or Muslim-owned businesses. There are reports of Muslims being beaten while security officials did nothing. Some reported that mobs marauded through the streets for hours without any response from the security forces. In Negombo, where an attack on a church during Easter services killed more than 100 people, gangs of Christian men moved from house to house, smashing windows, breaking down doors, dragging Muslims into the streets, punching them in the face & threatening to kill them. In Chilaw, police imposed a curfew after a dispute between Christians & Muslims turned violent. Mobs threw stones at mosques & Muslim-owned stores forcing troops to fire into the air to halt the violence.

The Sri Lankan government on 13 May 2019, widened a curfew after attacks on mosques & Muslim-owned businesses in the worst unrest since Easter bombings. They also blocked Facebook & WhatsApp to stop people inciting violence. Sri Lanka’s leading mobile phone operator, Dialog Axiata Plc said it had received instructions to block the apps Viber, IMO, Snapchat, Instagram & YouTube until further notice. The island nation has ramped up security as fears grow that the minority Sri Lankan Muslims could face sectarian violence. 

(Sri Lankan police & troops enforcing a curfew to prevent the spread of religious clashes between Muslims & Christians or Buddhists)

The Easter Sunday attack also set off alarm bells in New Delhi. While no group or individual has taken responsibility of the attack which hints at terror groups spreading their base in south Asia, has left Indian intelligence agencies working overtime to understand the nature & footprint of the attack.

Looking to the Future

IS is likely to further destabilise the country with more sensational attacks as terrorism thrives in a state of anarchy. The Easter Sunday attacks devastated the Sri Lankan tourism industry. According to Sri Lankan Tourism Bureau Chairman Kishu Gomes, the country faces lost tourism revenues of $750 million this year. A sustained collapse in tourism following the attacks on churches & hotels would deal a severe blow to the island’s economy. Tourism was Sri Lanka's 3rd largest & fastest growing source of foreign currency last year, accounting for almost $4.4 billion or 4.9% of GDP in 2018. Cancellations are affecting the entire tourism industry, from luxury hotels to beach shacks. But it is family-run businesses & sole traders that are the hardest hit. Millions of Sri Lankans rely on tourism. Analysing data from travel booking systems that record 17 million flight bookings a day, ForwardKeys found net bookings to Sri Lanka to be down 186% on average in the week following the attack, compared to the same period last year.

(Empty sunbathing chairs are seen on a beach near hotels in a tourist area in Bentota, 62km south of Colombo)

Where else is IS likely to find opportunities? India, Pakistan Bangladesh & Maldives continue to present opportunities, as does much of Central Asia. On 12 May 2019, IS claimed to have established a new "province" in India, the 1st of its kind announcement that came after clashes between militants & security forces in Kashmir on May 10. The Amaq News Agency announced that the Arabic name of the new branch is "Wilayah of Hind." Previously, IS attacks in Kashmir were linked to its so-called Khorasan Province branch, which was set up in 2014 to cover Afghanistan, Pakistan & nearby lands. In 2014, Al-Adnani announced the establishment of Wilayat Khorasan - a reference to a historical region broadly centering on Afghanistan & Pakistan. There were also reports of the IS flag being flown during a rally in Srinagar, the largest city & summer capital of the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir, after Friday prayers. Lt Gen Subrata Saha, then General Officer Commanding of Army's 15 Corps, said, "The emergence of the IS flags merited concern & deserved the highest attention of security agencies to prevent the youth of Kashmir from getting lured into IS."

The use of Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs) to increase kill rates

Terror groups have the capacity to learn & often copy from each other or export tried & proven methods to other theatres of operation. The use of VBIEDs enable a numerically & technologically inferior force to accurately strike its enemy using large explosive payloads. As such, it has become one of the most popular methods of attack for a variety of terrorist & insurgent groups, mainly due to its role as a force multiplier.

Although terrorists employ a wide variety of tactics & strategies, their attacks have often targeted buildings in urban environments. Buildings in densely populated areas are attractive targets for several reasons: they tend to be tall structures with high concentrations of occupants, allowing for mass casualties & injuries from a single targeted strike & they tend to be valuable assets, allowing for extensive property losses in the event of an attack.

Explosive devices can cause casualties & property damage in a variety of ways. Beyond a building’s collapse, an explosion can initiate uncontrollable fires that spread rapidly throughout the building; produce structural damage that traps people within the building & cause debris, broken glass & fragmented furniture to become harmful projectiles.

(Taliban drone footage of VBIED attack on an Afghan Army base in Nawa district, Helmand Province)

A VBIED can hold enough explosives to significantly damage or destroy a building. Because the extent of damage a VBIED can cause depends largely on its proximity to a target, terrorists have chosen to detonate VBIEDs in vehicles parked outside of buildings or within garages, or in vehicles that strike buildings.

(12,000-pound TNT equivalent VBIED attack on the US Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport on October 23, 1983 by Hezbollah)

The mass-casualty potential of a VBIED was evident in 1983 after VBIED attacks on the US Embassy in Beirut in 18 April, killing 63 people & the 12,000-pound TNT-equivalent VBIED attack on the USMC Barracks at the Beirut International Airport on 23 October, killing 241 personnel. The building was almost completely demolished. (Davies, 2007)

(1993 World Trade Centre VBIED bombing - the epicenter was the parking garage where a massive eruption carved out a nearly 100-foot crater several stories deep & several more high)

Other VBIED attacks include the Ramzi Yousef led a terrorist cell that detonated a 900-pound TNT-equivalent urea-nitrate VBIED delivered in a rented Ryder van in the underground garage of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. Yousuf wanted the bomb to topple one tower, with the collapsing debris knocking down the second. The attack turned out to be something of a deadly dress rehearsal for 9/11; with the help of Yousef’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al-Qaeda would later return to realize Yousef’s nightmarish vision.

(4,000 pound TNT equivalent VBIED attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh)

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a 4,000-pound TNT equivalent VBIED delivered in a rented truck outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The blast also damaged 324 buildings in a 16-block radius & destroyed 86 cars around the site. The building featured open-plan architecture combined with a glazed fa?ade, features that became vitally important when a VBIED was detonated on the curb side. The building comprised lightly reinforced columns common in non-seismic regions of the world. Such columns are vulnerable to shear failures due to the sideways pressure from blast loading & it is believed that the column closest to the blast shattered & the two columns either side failed in shear. Lacking strong internal partition walls or cladding, the building had no emergency means for redistributing loads & a progressive collapse was initiated which consumed nearly one half of the building, killing 168 people. The use of the transfer girder to support every other perimeter column has been widely attributed to the scale of the collapse, as was the lack of continuity of beam reinforcement through beam-column junctions. However, more recent forensic analysis of the building indicated that a 42m wide section of the building would still have collapsed had all the perimeter columns been continued to ground floor level & had full reinforcement. In the actual event a 48m wide section of the building collapsed. (Byfield & Paramasivam, 2012; NIST, 1995). This highlights the ease with which VBIEDs can cause extensive column shear failures & also the importance of alternative load paths to redistribute loads away from damaged columns. 

IS is most infamous for its widespread use of VBIEDs. They claimed to have conducted 815 VBIED attacks in Syria & Iraq in 2016 alone. From 2011-2016, Action on Armed Violence has recorded over 21,000 deaths & injuries from VBIEDs.

The people of Sri Lanka have paid far too high price for the lessons of the Easter weekend attacks to be ignored or forgotten.

References

Davis M (2007) Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. Verso Books, London, UK

Byfield MP and Paramasivam S (2012) The Murrah Building: A reassessment of the transfer girder. Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities, No. 4, DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CF.1943- 5509.0000227.

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Endro Sunarso is an expert in Security Management, Physical Security & Counter Terrorism. He is regularly consulted on matters pertaining to transportation security, off-shore security, critical infrastructure protection, security & threat assessments, & blast mitigation.

Endro has spent about 2 decades in corporate security (executive protection, crisis management, business continuity, due diligence, counter corporate espionage, etc). He also has more than a decade of experience in Security & Blast Consultancy work, initially in the Gulf Region & later in SE Asia.