Sri Lanka Bombings: Can We Really Trust ‘ISIS’ News Agency

This past Easter weekend saw a string of brutal terrorist bombings strike the country of Sri Lanka, targeting churches, luxury hotels and shopping malls, and killing over 300 people and injuring many others, with victims including Christian worshipers and a number of western citizens. While it is still unknown who carried out the attacks and what their motive was, western mainstream media and political leaders have already shifted into default mode, announcing that this was an “ISIS attack” and that it was somehow a “revenge attack” in retaliation last month’s mosque attack and mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand.

This speculation has fueled a global narrative currently cascading online under the banner of “Christianity is under attack” which is largely being driven by Right-wing pundits in the US, UK and Europe.

With so many commentators rushing to impose their own narrative onto this tragedy, it’s important to examine the facts, along with the geopolitical context in which this event has occurred.

MAHEM: Scene from a church in Colombo after bombing (Image Source: Tamil Guardian)

According to early statements made by Sri Lankan authorities, the attacks were likely to work of a local jihadist group known as National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ), but also admitted that “other nations had shared intelligence ahead of the blasts.” Which ‘other nations’ they were referring to is still unclear.

“There had been several warnings from foreign intelligence agencies about the impending attacks,” Sri Lanka’s Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne said at press conference in Colombo. “Persons named in intelligence reports are among those arrested. Some named in the reports had died during attacks.”

“We don’t see how a small organization can do all of this,” Senaratne added. “We are now investigating international support for the group and their other links.”

There are also striking CCTV camera footage which purports to show the identity of at least one ‘known’ suicide bomber/terrorist as he enters one of the churches prior to detonation. These clues seem to fit perfectly into the widely accepted terrorist narrative.

Then, as if by magic, some two days after the attack, the online portal called Amaq, commonly known as the “ISIS news agency”, released a dubious statement “claiming responsibility” for these alleged ‘suicide bombings’ in Sri Lanka. Naturally, most western mainstream media outlets took this anonymous posting as gospel and evidence of culpability, and have proceeded to build their updated story narratives around this post facto ‘claim of responsibility’ posted on the ISIS propaganda outlet.

After the Amaq posting, award-winning New York Times journalist Rukmini Callimachi came out confidently with an entire narrative to fit the new ‘ISIS’ story line:

1. The Islamic State’s news agency has claimed responsibility for the string of bombings in Sri Lanka which left 321 people dead. It’s taken them more than 2 days to do so, which is unusually long for ISIS: pic.twitter.com/DolnkeSAkc

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) April 23, 2019

As with every other recent (from 2014 to present) high-profile terrorist event, once ‘ISIS’ is injected into the coverage, it then precludes any possibility of a state actor, or a state-sponsored actor being involved in the said terrorist attacks.

For those mainstream journalists and politicians who are general proponents of the ‘ISIS’ narrative, the Sri Lankan government’s initial claims that this was a local NJT Sri Lankan operation, albeit with some outside help, will most likely be rejected out of hand in favor of the ISIS line.

As noted in the analysis below by Eurasia Future, the timing of the attacks may be beyond mere coincidence – especially following India’s recent provocation against Pakistan which had resulted in Pakistan downing two Indian jets, capturing and later releasing one Indian pilot – a humiliating incident for the Modi government in New Delhi presently angling for geopolitical hegemony over the region.

Adam Garrie at Eurasia Future offers some context and lays out a broader scenario…

The entire world remains confronted with the horrors that unfolded yesterday throughout Sri Lanka. Whilst the country remains under curfew, the authorities have pinned the blame for the attack on an obscure group called National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ). NTJ is reportedly an Islamist terror group that as noted by Sri Lankan authorities, has multiple links to foreign countries. The links to foreign countries appears to hold the key to determining who is really behind the attacks. Notably, it has been reported by journalists that the group trains in Chennai in Tamil Nadu – the same location where LTTE had previously trained. Others yet claim that NTJ is such a small and obscure group that even if it wanted to pull off such an attack, it did not have the capacity to do so.

As the Muslim population of Sri Lanka is less than 8% of the country’s entire population, it is difficult to conceive that any genuine local Islamist group would seek to stage such massive attacks when the possibility of any material gain would be limited by the fact that not only is Sri Lanka’s Muslim population at harmony with the Buddhist majority, but the population of Muslims is incredibly small. This contrasts sharply with the situation in Syria where a Sunni Muslim majority was weaponized against a leadership comprised of the minority Alawite faction.

Therefore, due to NTJ’s foreign links, it is highly likely that a foreign entity, most likely a foreign state or state intelligence agency was behind the attacks and that the men on the ground who have been captured are merely pawns in a much larger and even more dangerous game. When it comes to seeking to pin-pointing the country with a clear motive for orchestrating the attacks, India is the one that springs immediately to mind, not least because NTJ reportedly trains where the LTTE once did.

India has a long history of seeking to manipulate the power balance in Sri Lanka in order to turn the country into something of an Indian protectorate. These attempts have notably been resisted by most contemporary Sri Lankan leaders who seek an independent foreign policy that aims at securing win-win friendship not only with India but crucially, also with China and Pakistan.

In spite of this, India was one of the first open backers of the LTTE’s reign of terrorism that gripped Sri Lanka beginning in 1983. India ultimately paid a price for its dithering in the early stages of the Sri Lankan civil war. By the end of the 1987, India had given up on LTTE and instead sought to influence the situation by committing a deeply controversial peace keeping force to Sri Lanka whose overall effect only served to provoke further violence. As a result of India’s 1987 decision to publicly “switch sides”, LTTE assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. In spite of this, it has been widely known in Sri Lanka and elsewhere that in spite of the official rhetoric in New Delhi, India’s RAW intelligence agency resumed covert support of LTTE later in the 1990s.

Since the end of the war against LTTE in 2009, India has sought to monopolise foreign influence in a post-war Sri Lanka that has developed ever more economic ties with China and plays a key role in the Belt and Road initiative. This has clearly been a source of consternation for an Indian state that has a track record of meddling in the affairs of both Sri Lanka and the much smaller Maldives. In both Sri Lanka and the Maldives, political factions are often divided by foreign observers into a pro-India side and a pro-China side. Although such divisions are not black and white, there is a level of truth to such descriptions. As such, India recently engaged in what geopolitical expert Andrew Kroybko described as a “electoral regime change in the Maldives”. This came after the prominent BJP supporter Subramanian Swamy called for a traditional war against the Maldives.

Garrie concluded that:

[W]hile it cannot be concluded with certainty that yesterday’s atrocity was a false flag attack, it can certainly not be ruled out. As such, anyone with a clear motive for conducting a false flag attack should be thoroughly investigated by the Sri Lankan authorities.

Continue this analysis at Eurasia Future

Certainly, the next few days may reveal addition information which could give a clearer picture of the who mounted these attacks and why, but readers should also be on guard for dubious information injected into the picture which could be used to a sculpt a narrative before the all the forensic and empirical evidence has been gathered and collated.

More analysis to come from 21WIRE.

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