A 24-year-old suspected Islamic State (IS) recruit from Kerala has been killed in a drone attack in an undisclosed territory somewhere in Afghanistan.
Relatives yesterday said Hafeezuddin’s mother received a message from Sajid, a distant relative and fellow recruit, stating her son had died in a drone attack and had been buried in Afghanistan.
Sajid, however, did not give more details in the message on the Telegram messaging app which he is supposed to have downloaded soon after joining the militant group almost a year ago.
“Sajid sent a message on Saturday night. We asked him to send us photographs. But there has been no response,” said Abdul Salam, his maternal uncle in northern Kasaragod. Some 15 people, including women and children, have been missing from the district and are believed to have joined the IS group.
A message from another recruit, Ashfaq Abdul Majeed, to a social worker, B C Abdul Rahman, confirmed Hafeezuddin had been killed in a drone attack. “Hafees was killed by a drone strike on Saturday,” the message read.
“We have shared with the police whatever information we had,” Rahman told the media.
Hafeezuddin had got married just four months before leaving India. However, he left his wife behind in India after she refused to join him on his journey. Hafeezuddin later told relatives via a phone call that he was going to marry a Pakistani woman with a child.
Relatives disclosed that when Hafeezuddin’s mother asked him to send a recent photograph of his, he refused saying it would frighten her as he had transformed into a fighter. He instead asked her to join him with other family members.
While the relatives believe the men and their families are with the Khorasan (the old name for Afghanistan and surrounding areas) branch of the IS established in 2015, police remain clueless about their whereabouts.
Reports say Afghanistan and US/Nato forces are eliminating the IS militants from their pockets of Helmand, Zabul, Farah, Logar and Nangarhar, the de facto capital. The militants are estimated to number around 3,000 and many have died in US airstrikes.
There have so far been 21 registered cases of suspected IS recruits, mainly from Kasaragod district. They also include people from Palakkad, Ernakulam and Trivandrum districts.
It is feared that more people of Kerala origin missing from other countries could have joined the militants as in the case of Sajid, who claims he joined the IS ranks after leaving his job in Dubai.
Earlier, India’s National Investigation Agency had arrested two men on charges of aiding those who left to join the militants. They were identified as Abdul Rashid Abdullah, a resident of nearby Trikaripur village and a key conspirator, a software engineer, who later joined the group.
Hafeezuddin
