A Zawahiri video and how Assam cops busted ‘al-Qaida modules’

Days before al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in a US drone strike, the Assam police raised concern about a video in which the most-wanted terrorist purportedly made an appeal to his cadres or followers to do “hijrah” (migration) to the northeastern state.
“The AQIS (The al-Qaida in Indian Subcontinent) is showing interest to expand its network into the Northeast. In one of the videos AQIS has released, AQ leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has himself appealed to do hijrah into Assam…That is disturbing,” Assam police chief Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta had said on July 28.
His comments came after the state police claimed to have busted a network of the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), an affiliate of the AQIS, last week. As many as 11 people were arrested from Barpeta, Morigaon, Guwahati (Kamrup Metro) and Goalpara districts for their alleged links to global terrorist organisations, especially ABT/AQIS, GP Singh, Special Director-General of Police (law & order, border) told TOI Plus.

“Earlier we had nabbed 12 and the NIA (National Investigation) had arrested six persons. That makes a total of 29 arrests since February this year,” Singh said, adding the police seized several mobile phones, tablets and laptops from where “information or evidence” of their alleged links to global terrorist outfits emerged.
The arrests made last week was the result of months-long intelligence operation run by the state police in collaboration with central agencies. The operation led to the busting of the financial linkages of al-Qaida and its affiliates in India, according to top police officials.
ABT and AQIS?
Bangladesh had banned ABT, a radical Islamist outfit, in May 2015 for its suspected involvement in the killing of three secular bloggers. ABT started recruiting highly motivated and educated university students, who are fluent in English language and social media-savvy. According to an assessment made in 2016, ABT was a bigger outfit than Harakat ul-Jihad al-Islami-Bangladesh (HUJI-B) and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).
However, it is difficult to specify its concrete strength in numbers since it has rather fluid organisational structures. Usually they work in small cells comprising 4 to 7 people in one unit, according to a paper titled ‘Ansarullah Bangla Team: A Major Threat for Bangladesh’s Democracy’.
It further said that ABT is heavily influenced by extremist ideologues, such as Anwar Al-Awlaki who was killed by a US drone strike in 2011. Subsequently, this group was drawn closer to armed jihadist ideology of al-Qaida and Islamic State (IS) to wage holy war in Bangladesh and abroad.
The AQIS was launched in September 2014 with a goal to operate across South Asia, according to the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) based in The Hague. More than a dozen terrorist outfits drawn mostly from Pakistan besides a few from Bangladesh and India are affiliated to AQIS.
The NIA raids
The recent operation by the Assam police came two months after the NIA conducted raids at two locations in Barpeta district of in connection with alleged recruitment carried out by ABT.
Prior to this, the federal anti-terror agency had registered a case in March, according to which, a Bangladeshi national had entered India illegally and was active in recruiting, training and motivating impressionable youngsters to join jihadi outfits and work in “Ansars” (sleeper cells module) for creating a base for the Al-Qaeda in India, an NIA spokesperson was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.
In the recent operation, the Assam police arrested eight persons for their alleged links with AQIS/ABT in Barpeta under sections 120(b)/121/121(A) of the Indian Penal Code and various sections of the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, better known as UAPA.

Those arrested from Morigaon district included Afsaruddin Bhuyan from Morigaon and Mustafa alias Mufti Mustafa, who allegedly acted as a financial conduit for the ABT/AQIS. They were also running two madrassas in Morigaon, which were allegedly used to indoctrinate students.
“We are keeping a close watch on a few other madrasas and mosques which were visited by radical elements (from Bangladesh),” Special DG Singh said.
A pan-India network?
Hours before the Assam police’s crackdown on the ABT/AQIS modules, the Bengaluru police nabbed a 24-year-old food delivery boy, Akhtar Hussian Lashkar, who belongs to Assam’s Cachar district. The suspect, who has been living in the Karnataka capital since 2020, allegedly identified himself as a member of al-Qaida. He was produced in a city court and later remanded in police custody.
Based on information provided by Lashkar, another man from Assam was detained by the Bengaluru police in Tamil Nadu’s Salem. The series of arrests indicates that ABT/AQIS had deployed several sleeper cells in Assam and other states.
Senior police officials said ABT/AQIS modules entered Assam through West Bengal. These groups first stayed in West Bengal where they can easily converse in Bengali language to radicalise the local youth.
However, it’s not just AQIS alone that has stepped up its activities in Assam. Even the Islamic State (ISIS) seems to be trying to spread its tentacles in the state. Recently, security agencies have stumbled upon a Bengali version of ‘Voice of Hind’ (Hinder Awaz), a propaganda magazine suspected to be published by ISIS, which appeals to Indian Muslims to “wake up” and fight against the alleged oppression and atrocities meted out to the community.
It has also published photographs of India’s top leadership, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, identifying them as enemies. TOI Plus has reviewed a copy of the publication.
Singh, however, played down the threat perception, saying such types of magazines have been doing the rounds for years. “This is not a new phenomenon. al-Qaida first published a Bengali version of its magazine in 2017. Similarly, ISIS has been running multilingual publications for several years,” he claimed.
Why Assam?
According to analysts, AQIS and Islamic State have been competing with each other to extend their respective networks in Bangladesh and the adjoining region primarily to generate funds. But their attempts to radicalise Indian youth and recruit them in large numbers have not been very successful because of counter-radicalisation measures initiated by security agencies.
“Media started reporting on the IS trying to establish a ‘Bengal Caliphate’ between 2015 and 2017,” said Kabir Taneja, a Fellow with Strategic Studies programme at Observer Research Foundation.
“However, the modus operandi of the IS was completely different from al-Qaida. The former is a very do-it-yourself kind of organisation. The people in India who largely succumbed to that narrative were the ones who wanted to travel to the caliphate, which was in Syria. So, that was their (IS) ultimate aim. They were not very interested in creating a Bengal, UP or a Kashmir unit,” Taneja, who authored a book, ‘The ISIS Peril’ (Penguin Random House/2019), told TOI Plus.
Seen from that perspective, the IS had never posed a big threat to India, he said. The IS has been on a decline since the death of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019, and his replacement (the new caliph) was killed within six months. “The IS post Baghdadi became very diluted, largely running through online propaganda units although it has some strong affiliations in Africa at this point of time,” Taneja maintained.
However, al-Qaida is different. “The AQ is much more grounded and a hierarchical organisation; an organisation that plays a long game.”
The AQ has had a very strong presence in Bangladesh. It has used areas like Cox’s Bazar for “illicit transportation” of people, money and some weapons, but never conducted any operations in the region, according to Taneja.
Assam which faces the problem of illegal migrants from Bangladesh seems to have caught the attention of jihadist terror outfits in the wake of the Supreme Court-monitored exercise to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act or CAA. While the Assam-specific NRC was aimed at weeding out foreigners staying illegally in the state, CAA seeks to grant citizenship to persecuted minorities from neighbouring countries – Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Organisations such as AQIS tried to exploit the perception generated due to protests by some opposition parties and human rights organisations that these legal instruments would be used against Muslims. “They made a similar attempt during the Hijab row, but did not succeed,” Taneja said, stressing that AQIS is a much bigger threat than the IS(Khorasan), which came into existence only in 2015. This explains why Assam police had gone into overdrive to nab so many suspects at one go.
He too claimed that IS has been running multilingual publications for several years. “But it is difficult to attach any motive of terror attacks to such publications at this moment because there is no empirical evidence,” Taneja said.
Nevertheless, the top brass of the Assam police exudes confidence that they can easily tackle the radical elements such as AQIS, which are trying to indoctrinate youth in some pockets. “Given our experience in handling insurgency, this should not be a problem for us,” Special DGP Singh said in his concluding remark.