How the Islamic State is spreading slowly but surely it's wings in Indian states.

How the Islamic State is spreading it's wings in Indian states, slowly but surely. (HT).

Some of at least 75 Indians were arrested from airports while on their way to join the terror group in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, while several are also reported to have died in battle abroad.

The state-wise break-up of Indians arrested for alleged links to Islamic State reveals a slow, yet nationwide appeal of the terror group.

Of the 75 held as of March this year, Kerala accounted for 21, Telangana 16, Karnataka nine, Maharashtra eight, Madhya Pradesh six, Uttarakhand four, Uttar Pradesh three, Rajasthan two, Tamil Nadu four and Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal had one each. Apart from these, 10 suspected IS activists were held in multi-state raids on April 20.

There are up to seven IS terror modules in India, though the group is yet to carry out any major attack in the country.

At least 75 Indians are also believed to have gone to fight for IS in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, including some Indian-origin youngsters from other countries. Since 2014, some of them were arrested from airports while on their way to join jihad, while several are also reported to have died in battle abroad.

Perhaps the most famous of these was the group of 21, including at least six women and three children, which disappeared from northern Kerala and reportedly went to Nangarhar province of Afghanistan. When the US dropped the “mother of all bombs” on April 13 on caves in Nangarhar, it was reported that at least 13 Indians were among the 96 terrorists killed.

Two of the Kerala youngsters were killed in the same area, one in a drone strike, but it’s not yet clear if some Malayalis died in the MOAB attack. A third man, a Christian who converted to Islam, died a couple of days ago.

While many plots by IS terrorists have been foiled, including one allegedly targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the group’s first known “successful” strike in India was a pipe bomb explosion in a Bhopal-Ujjain passenger train at Jabri railway station in Madhya Pradesh on March 7. The blast injured 10 passengers, with no fatalities.

Arrests of nearly 10 suspects linked to that blast led security agencies to modules in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, and to Saifullah, who fired back from his hideout in Lucknow before being shot dead.

Unlike the common perception, data from the National Investigation Agency revealed many of the youngsters joining IS are from middle or upper classes. Many including the Kerala youngsters had studied or worked in Gulf states.

They are mostly technically savvy, which explains their radicalisation online, through blogs, Twitter or groups on Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Kik, VKontakte, Viber and Skype. According to an analysis of NIA data in January, 28 of the 52 arrested IS suspects were aged 18 to 25 and 20 of them were graduates.

The extent of online radicalisation was revealed first with the arrest of Mehdi Masroor Biswas in December 2014 from Bengaluru. Biswas used his twitter account @shamiwitness to send out more than 124,000 tweets that defended the IS and exhorted youngsters to join the group. Intelligence agencies were able to bust such online communications after infiltrating encrypted chat apps such as Telegram through mission Operation Chakravyuh.

Besides online radicalisation, some youngsters were brainwashed in person by people allegedly associated with radical preacher Zakir Naik and the Peace Foundation in Kerala and its schools.

In the first successful conviction of a case related to IS, a special court on April 21 sentenced two men to seven years in jail after they pleaded guilty to criminally conspiring to raise funds and recruiting people for the group. Read the full story here.

'Refugees' welcome - Kurdish Yazidi woman recognizes her ISIS abuser in Germany.

'Refugees' welcome - Kurdish Yazidi woman recognizes her ISIS abuser in Germany. (Basnews).

A Kurdish Yazidi woman who survived the so-called Islamic State (ISIS/IS) captivity accidentally saw her IS abuser in Germany.

The Kurdish Yazidi woman who is now receiving psychological treatment in Germany happened to see the IS militant who had maltreated her for four months while she was in IS captivity, Al-Alam News Channel reported on Sunday.

The IS militant who is said to be of Syrian origin is now living with his family in a refugee camp in Germany.

Abu Shuja'a Dinayi, an activist in freeing Yazidi women from IS, told Sputnik that the Yazidi woman has recognized the IS miltant in a market in Baden, Germany.

The Yazidi woman has informed the German police about the IS militant who had assaulted her for four months, he said.

After IS militants attacked the Yazidi town of Sinjar in mid-2014, they carried out various types of atrocities against Yazidis in the area. They abducted nearly 5,000 Yazidi women and girls and enslaved them in the IS-held territories in Iraq and Syria. Around 2,000 of the abducted Yazidis however have so far been freed from the grip of the militants.

Russia - About 60 Islamic State Sympathizers detained in underground Salafi 'prayer house' in Samara.

Russia - About 60 Islamic State Sympathizers detained in underground Salafi 'prayer house' in Samara. (Tass).

About 60 persons were detained on Friday in an underground prayer house of a Salafi Islamic cell in Samara, a city in the Middle Volga area, a spokesman for the regional department.

An improvised explosive device found in the same house was destroyed and samples of the blasting agent were taken away for an expert study.

"In the course of the operation at the site of gathering of a Salafi religious cell, some sixty people were detained," he said. "We had information on a number of individuals affiliated with the cell who are taking part in the armed conflict in Syria as paramilitaries."

A former member of the same cell, a resident of Samara, who is now a paramilitary in the ranks of the Islamic State terrorist grouping is known as a producer of a number of video clips uploaded in the Internet.

"The operatives found an improvised explosive device during the search in the building," the spokesman said. "Demolition engineers didn't manage to defuse it and had to demolish it on the spot."

"Also, they found extremist literature," he said. "About sixty persons were detained and taken to the Krasnoglinski district police department where police officers are questioning them over their possible involvement in the crime."

During the efforts to defuse and demolish the explosive, police fully fenced off a section of the M5 federal automobile road, as the building where the prayer house was located stands at a distance of a mere 30 meters away from the road.

The column of flame produced by the explosion was about 15 meters tall. The blast destroyed several annexes to the building.

This Former US man wanted to marry Afsha Jasbeen - the top recruiter for Islamic State.

This Former US man wanted to marry Afsha Jasbeen - the top recruiter for Islamic State.(ZeeNews).

New Delhi: The Indian woman, who was recently arrested by the Cyberabad police for her alleged involvement in recruitment for ISIS terror outfit, had a secret admirer who was so smitten by the 37-year-old Afsha Jasbeen aka Nicky Joseph that he proposed to her online and wanted to marry her, a report said.

The 32-year-old unemployed electronics engineer had returned to Hyderabad from US after his visa was not extended. He is married with two children, and was spending most of his time browsing the internet while searching for a job.

Seven years ago, Afsha Jasbeen and Salman Mohiuddin met on Facebook and later while discussing over their common interest topic - discussions on various online forums about Islam and Christianity – they eventually found the Islamic State (IS) propaganda websites last year, as per a report published in Indian Express.

While Afsha knew Salman by his original name, Salman knew her only as 'Nikki alias Nicole Joseph', a British national living in Dubai who converted to Islam and is an ardent supporter of IS, the report added.

By the time, Salman decided to go to Dubai in January, this year and seek to help her to go to Syria and join the Islamic State militant organisation, he was so smitten by Nicole that he proposed to her online and wanted to marry her. After her arrest on Friday, Afsha flatly denied knowing Salman. Hmmm.....'Bonnie and Clyde ...ISIS Style. Read the full story here.