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Monday, April 29, 2019, 12:22
Analysts warn of rising threat of extremism
By Prime Sarmiento in Hong Kong
Monday, April 29, 2019, 12:22 By Prime Sarmiento in Hong Kong

Islamic State claims responsibility for Easter church and hotel bombings in Sri Lanka that left hundreds dead

A woman weeps over the grave of a victim who was killed in the Easter Sunday bombings in Colombo, Sri Lanka on April 23, 2019. (Photo / IC)

For three minutes on April 23 the whole nation of Sri Lanka stopped everything to observe a nationwide silence to remember the more than 350 victims of the Easter Sunday blasts two days earlier.

For a day, 21 million Sri Lankans mourned the dead and held mass burials in several different locations.

For weeks or possibly months to come, Sri Lankans will be wondering about the blasts and how to curb terrorism.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility on April 23 for the attacks, but offered no evidence, The Associated Press reported.

Details began to emerge in Sri Lanka of a band of nine, well-educated Islamist suicide bombers, including a woman, from well-to-do families, according to police.

The leader of the group that carried out the attacks is known as Mohammed Zahran Hashim, who is the central unmasked figure in a photo of the alleged attack team issued by an Islamic State publicity outlet, Reuters reported.

Analysts saw the bombings on Easter Sunday as heralding the rise of extremist groups in Sri Lanka amid surging international racial discrimination and uncertainties.

The bombing of churches and hotels was the worst single-day attack that Sri Lanka has witnessed in decades, some say worse than the civil war killings.

Analysts note that while Sri Lanka has little history of Islamic terrorism, extremist groups are slowly gaining ground in the island nation.

“Sri Lanka’s Muslim community is a model community,” said Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Gunaratna told China Daily that the Muslim community has even supported the government in its efforts to crush the Tamil Tigers — the militant separatist group involved in the decades-long civil war.

“But, unfortunately, the security situation in the last years has deteriorated,” he said, noting that this allowed terrorist groups to take root.

“The vast majority of Muslims in Sri Lanka are active law-abiding peaceful citizens living harmoniously with non-Muslims in a diverse society,” said Mustafa Izzuddin, research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, at National University of Singapore, or NUS.

He said extremism is “not a ubiquitous problem in Sri Lanka” and is part of the broader global problem of transnational terrorism.

A day after chairing an emergency meeting with the National Security Council, Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena placed the country under a state of emergency. Police spokesperson Ruwan Gunasekara said at least 26 people were arrested in connection with the bombings.

Sirisena said he will ask for foreign assistance as the country’s intelligence agencies revealed that there are international terrorist organizations behind these incidents.

While a civil war once wrought havoc in Sri Lanka, the conflict was mainly due to ethnic, not religious, tensions.

About 70 percent of Sri Lanka’s people are Buddhists, while the rest are Hindus, Muslims or Christians.

Chulanee Attanayake, a visiting research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies at NUS, said ideas about radical Islamism came into the country around 2006-07 and mainly spread in the eastern provinces.

Attanayake once served as the director for research at the Institute of National Security Studies Sri Lanka. She said these ideas were spread by Muslim Sri Lankans who worked and studied in the Middle East.

“Islamic radicalization is a recent phenomenon in Sri Lanka,” she said.

Over the long term, she suggested that the government needs to beef up its security and institute a more integrated sharing of intelligence among various agencies to counter terrorism.

prime@chinadailyapac.com


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