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What Is National Thowheeth Jama’ath? Suspicion Falls on Sri Lanka Islamist Group Sri Lanka Blames Radical Islamist Group for Easter Bombings
(about 1 hour later)
As the authorities investigate the bombings in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, their focus has centered on National Thowheeth Jama’ath, a little-known group that experts said promotes Islamist terrorist ideology. NEW DELHI — Sri Lankan officials said on Monday that the coordinated bombings of churches and hotels across the country on Easter Sunday had been carried out by National Thowheeth Jama’ath, a little-known radical Islamist group, with help from international militants.
No one has claimed responsibility for the suicide attacks, which killed at least 290 people, and the Sri Lankan authorities have so far not identified any group as being behind them, even as they have arrested two dozen suspects. Rajitha Senaratne, the Sri Lankan health minister, blamed the group at a news conference in Colombo, the capital, adding: “There was an international network without which these attacks could not have succeeded.”
But 10 days before the attacks, a police official sent an advisory to the security authorities warning of a possible threat to churches by National Thowheeth Jama’ath. The government assumed emergency powers in order to investigate the attacks and imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew for the second consecutive night. The government is also asking other countries for help in uncovering international links, Reuters reported.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said on Sunday that he and other top government officials had not been informed of the threat, and that “we must look into why adequate precautions were not taken.” [Follow our live updates on the Sri Lanka bombings.]
Until now, National Thowheeth Jama’ath was known mainly in Sri Lanka for vandalizing Buddhist statues. In 2016, its secretary, Abdul Razik, was arrested on charges of inciting racism. No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks on Sunday, which targeted Roman Catholic churches holding Easter services and high-end hotels favored by foreign tourists. On Monday, officials said the death toll had risen to at least 290, with about 500 others wounded. The Sri Lankan authorities have so far arrested two dozen suspects, but declined to identify them.
But while Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, was ravaged by decades of civil war that ended in 2009, it has little history of militant Islamist violence. A forensic analysis by the Sri Lankan government of human remains found at three churches and three hotels determined that seven suicide bombers had carried out the attacks, according to The Associated Press. Most assaults were carried out by a single bomber, but two targeted the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo. Bombings at a guesthouse and the suspects’ safe house remain under investigation.
In that internecine conflict, the Sri Lankan government, largely led by a Buddhist elite, put down a rebellion by ethnic Tamils, who are primarily Hindu but also include Muslims and Christians. In interviews, counterterrorism experts said that such an extensively planned and coordinated attack would almost certainly have required considerable financing and expertise from a more experienced group overseas.
The goal of National Thowheeth Jama’ath is not insurrection, said Anne Speckhard, the director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism. Instead, it aims to spread the global jihadist movement to Sri Lanka and to create hatred, fear and divisions in society. “The target selection and attack type make me very skeptical that this was carried out by a local group without any outside involvement,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a specialist in Sri Lankan extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counterterrorism research group based in London. “There’s no reason for local extremist groups to attack churches, and little reason to attack tourists.”
Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, was ravaged by decades of civil war that ended in 2009, but it has little history of militant Islamist violence. The suicide bombings that were pioneered there starting in the 1980s were mainly carried out by Hindu guerrillas from the country’s Tamil ethnic minority, not Muslims.
Anne Speckhard, the director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, contrasted the attacks by Tamil guerrillas with those attributed to National Thowheeth Jama’ath. Unlike the bombings on Sunday, she said, those during the civil war were part of a nationalist or ethnic separatist movement, and they mostly targeted political leaders rather than religious ones.
“These attacks appear to be quite different,” she said, “and look as if they came right out of the ISIS, Al Qaeda, global militant jihadist playbook, as these are attacks fomenting religious hatred by attacking multiple churches on a high religious holiday.”
National Thowheeth Jama’ath is a small but violent group of young Muslims that started at least three years ago in eastern Sri Lanka, far from the country’s more cosmopolitan western and southern coasts. Until this month, the group was generally perceived as anti-Buddhist, counterterrorism experts said.
Radical Islamist groups like Al Qaeda also have experience in organizing and carrying out simultaneous suicide attacks — most notably those in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
Local ties with such groups may have been strengthened in recent years by Sri Lankan Muslims who traveled to fight in wars in Syria and Iraq, said Sameer Patil, a national security fellow at Gateway House, a foreign policy research group in Mumbai, India. With the Islamic State having recently lost its last patch of territory in Syria, he said, the group’s foreign fighters are now more likely to return home to Sri Lanka and other countries.
“It was just a matter of time before that would hit them on their own soil,” Mr. Patil said.
Ms. Speckhard said the aim of National Thowheeth Jama’ath was to spread the global jihadist movement to Sri Lanka and to create hatred, fear and divisions in society.
“It is not about a separatist movement,” she said. “It is about religion and punishing.”“It is not about a separatist movement,” she said. “It is about religion and punishing.”
The coordinated suicide bombings on Sunday, targeting members of Sri Lanka’s Roman Catholic minority and guests at hotels favored by foreign tourists, were similar to those carried out elsewhere by major Islamist militant groups, Ms. Speckhard said. Sectarian divisions are ripe for exploitation in Sri Lanka, whose ethnic Sinhalese majority is mostly Buddhist. Sri Lankan Muslims, who make up about one-tenth of the population and mostly belong to the Tamil ethnic group, have a long history of conflict with the country’s Buddhists and Hindus, said Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
“These attacks appear to be quite different and look as if they came right out of the ISIS, Al Qaeda, global militant jihadist playbook, as these are attacks fomenting religious hatred by attacking multiple churches on a high religious holiday,” she said. The conflict stems partly from statues and other human portrayals of Buddhist and Hindu deities, which some Muslims perceive as idolatrous.
The Tamil Tigers were among the first groups in the world to use suicide bombings as a common tactic. The civil war ended a decade ago after a large-scale operation by the army that defeated the Tamil Tigers and killed their leader. In recent years, Buddhist extremist groups have sprung up among the Sinhalese, who make up nearly three-quarters of the Sri Lankan population. The groups seek to protect statues of Buddha from desecration and make Buddhism more central to Sri Lankan life, but they have also fomented violence. Last year, the Sri Lankan government declared a nationwide state of emergency after mob attacks against Muslims in the central district of Kandy.
National Thowheeth Jama’ath appears to have emerged as part of a backlash by Sri Lankan Muslims against these Buddhist extremist groups, said Kabir Taneja, a counterterrorism expert at the Observer Research Foundation, a public policy research group in Mumbai.
Until now, National Thowheeth Jama’ath was known mainly for vandalizing Buddhist statues. In November 2016, its secretary, Abdul Razik, was arrested on charges of inciting racism.
Four months later, the group was involved in a violent clash in Kattankudy, a mostly Muslim community near the eastern city of Batticaloa, where one of the church bombings took place on Sunday. Three people were hospitalized and 10 were arrested, according to local news reports.
Mr. Chellaney noted that there was also a large group called Thowheeth Jama’ath in the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which lies across a strait from Sri Lanka and has a large Tamil population. Smaller chapters with the same name appear to have been set up in Sri Lankan communities in other countries, he said, often funded by groups in the Persian Gulf and subscribing to Wahhabism, an austere form of Islam that has its roots there. Mr. Chellaney described them as “sister organizations” but said the links among them were unclear.
Counterterrorism experts said that in Sri Lanka, National Thowheeth Jama’ath appeared to consist almost entirely of young people, especially recent graduates of Islamic schools. The group appears to have little hierarchy or organizational structure, and no older leaders.
The presence of mostly young people with deep roots in the community but no strong, mature leaders would make it similar to other local groups in the Muslim world with which the Islamic State has tried to form affiliations.
The Sri Lankan government has acknowledged that 10 days before the attacks, the police warned security officials of a possible threat to churches by National Thowheeth Jama’ath.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said on Sunday that he and other top government officials had not been informed of the threat, and that “we must look into why adequate precautions were not taken.”