died in a drone attack.

Now from Syria and Afghanistan, men like Bexen and Abdul Khayoom are motivating others to join the IS. In April this year, the NIA arrested Riyas Aboobacker from Palakkad. According to NIA, he was in touch with Khayoom and others and was planning suicide attacks at popular tourist places in Kerala.

On June 12th, the NIA arrested Mohammed Azarudeen, who they say is the mastermind of an IS module in Tamil Nadu. Azarudeen was friends with the main Sri Lankan suicide bomber, Zahran Hashim. He maintained a Facebook page named KhilafahGFX and had plans to carry out attacks in Tamil Nadu, especially on temples and churches. Azarudeen and his two associates were arrested after NIA conducted raids at seven places in Coimbatore.

A senior NIA investigatorsays that most people he has interrogated believe that Muslims in India have got dealt a bad hand. He gives the example of Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani, a native of Hyderabad, who held an engineering degree, and got initiated into the IS fold while working in Saudi Arabia. After his arrest in June 2016, he told investigators that he had grown up while listening to his grandmother’s story of how Hyderabad was annexed by the Indian Government in 1948 and how they lost their status.

Guided by a notorious IS handler (Abu Sa’ad al-Sudani, a Sudanese national, who died with his wife in a bomb explosion in Syria in April 2016), who worked on him for almost one-and- a-half years, Yazdani created a small IS cell, comprising seven others among