Families from Kerala work to build Islamic State

up a community that will nurture future jihadists who will arrive from Kerala and other parts of India for training,” says an Indian intelligence official. “This is the incubator, the nursery.”

Hamsa Sagar, the Rehman family’s comfortable home near Kasaragod, isn’t anyone’s conception of a jihad incubator. Ejaz practised medicine; his younger brother was an engineer; their father, Abdul Rehman, worked hard overseas to lay solid middle-class foundations for his family,andbyallaccounts,hadlittletodo with religious chauvinism. Three years ago,though,thesonsdiscoveredneo-fundamentalistreligion,andbeganrebelling against their father, saying they wanted to live life as the Prophet had.

“Theyrejectedallthis,”abdulrehman says, “this life I had made”.

Innangarhar,thelifetheyhaveishard. The region they inhabit, Indian intelligence officials believe, is remote and mountainous, unconnected by regular road links. The rest of the migrants from Kerala are also thought to be living in villagehomesdottedaroundthesamearea.

“Ejaz said both families are living together in a small house”, his mother says. “There is no air conditioner or fridge or any luxury. But, they say they are living in heaven and would not come back.”

In their last call home, made a month and a half ago, Ejaz told his family about the birth of the two sons, and said he was running a medical clinic — contributing his skills as a doctor to the war-torn community. Shihaz, he said, was working as a teacher, also volunteering his knowledge of the sciences.

A third child has been born to the fledgling Islamic State community from Kerala. Bexin Vincent, who named himself Issa after converting to Islam, called hisfatherkfvincenttoinformhimofthe news.bexincalledhismother-in-law,too, to say his wife and he were living some distance away, and that phone calls were expensive.

Thoughafsathrehmancravesphone calls from her children, her husband disagrees. “I don’t like attending to their calls,”hesaysbluntly.“whenwetellthem to come back, they ask us to join them in what they tell us is the true Islamic life. Theyimaginetheyarelivingaseverytrue Muslim should. It’s a lecture, not a conversation.”

Abdul Rehman says he believes othersinkasaragodarealsointouchwithhis sons. “When one of our family members met with an accident a few months ago, Ejaz came to know about it much before I did,” he says.

Local police and intelligence officials agree. “There’s a whole subterranean Islamist network that’s still active in Kerala, sympathetic to the Islamic State project,” says an officer familiar with the investigationintothedisappearance.“the next stage will likely be the recruitment of volunteers for actual military training.”

Thatassessmentmaynotbealarmist: al-qaeda channels on the encrypted chat client Telegram, for example, have been producing prodigious amounts of translated propaganda material in Tamil and Malayalamforthepastsixmonths,translating the primary texts of jihadist patriarchs Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-zawahiri for audiences so far unfamiliar with them.

It isn’t hard to detect the communal strains that underly this development. Ashfaque Masjid, who travelled to Nangarhar with his wife, Shamsiya, and one-year-old daughter Ayesha, called his sister, Shajira Majid, some months ago. “Thisisalandofmuslims,”shajiramajeed recalls her brother saying, “and we need not see any Hindu here. He wanted all of us join him in that place. He told us he would not return.”

No one is quite certain what shaped Ashfaque Majid’s world view. Until 2012 a commerce student at Mumbai’s Mithibhai College, he looked after his father’s hotel business in the city alongside.

Butthen,accordingtochargesfiledby the National Investigation Agency, Majid made contact with Arshi Qureshi, a manager with controversial neo-fundamentalistpreacherzakirnaikislamicresearch Foundation, who in turn put him touch with the cult in Kasaragod. Majid broke withhisfamilybusiness,andmovedback to Kerala.

The idea that emigrating is necessary for a full practice of Islam has old roots in Southasia’spoliticalhistory:in1920,tens of thousands responded to calls to make hijrat,ormigration,toafghanistan,rather than live in British-ruled India. Large numbers of migrants were killed by hunger or looters; the Khyber pass, contemporary accounts record, was littered with corpses.

Forthefamiliesofmanyofthosewho havegonetoafghanistan,thepoliticsunderlyingtheirmigrationisincomprehensible.mohammadmehmood,whoseson Mohammad Salil was among the migrants,hasgottwocallsfromhisson,once a well-off worker in Sharjah.

“When I asked him why left home, he had no answers,” Mehmood says. “He is living according Koran and has no plan to return. I pick up his calls, and he starts delivering religious sermons.”

The shortest conversations have been between Hafeezuddin and his mother, Khadeeja. “The words get stuck in my throat,” she says, speaking from behind a half-closed door. “I cried when he last called. He told me that we would meet in heaven.”

He’s sent Telegram messages since. “Sleep doesn’t help when it’s your soul that’s tired,” one reads.