Colombo urgently needs to correct the intelligence failures that  led  to the Easter attacks

While threats are always easier spotted in hindsight, the Easter attacks nevertheless represented a massive security failure by the Sri Lankan state.
Foreign intelligence services had warned their Sri Lankan counterparts of a significant imminent attack on churches weeks before the bombing, even naming the radical Salafi preacher, M.C.M. Zaharan, who helped organise the attacks. Not all of the small group of jihadists involved in the bombings were identified in advance, but Zaharan was known to Sri Lanka’s police. The anti-terrorism division of the police had been tracking him since the faction he led brutally attacked followers of a moderate Sufi Muslim cleric in 2017, and had warrants out for his arrest.
A less dysfunctional government might have still failed to connect incoming intelligence with the information on Zaharan in Sri Lankan police files, but it would have tried much harder. The Sri Lankan government’s complacency has several possible explanations. Senior leaders might have had suspicions about the sources of the intelligence. Police and intelligence officers might have discounted the possibility of mass jihadist violence in a country that had never seen it before. And national security agencies caught in an ugly political tug of war between President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe almost certainly suffered from too little coordination and too much politicization.
What has happened since the attacks is as concerning as what happened before. To begin with, the government has done little to address the dysfunction that likely obstructed police and intelligence services from making deductions that could have prevented the attacks.
The rivalry between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe persists and is now complicating investigations into the attacks and the failure to prevent them.

PUBLIC ANGER

Worse still, with senior politicians refusing to take meaningful responsibility for the attacks, public anger has focused on the nation’s nearly two million Muslims, whose leaders are accused of not foreseeing or preventing the radicalisation of Zaharan and his cadre.
In fact, Muslim community leaders, and at least some politicians, repeatedly rejected Zaharan’s preaching and warned police and government leaders several times about the growing threat he and his followers posed. And while the bombings have led some Muslims to undertake a process of “introspection” about the changing nature of Muslim culture in Sri Lanka – calling for closer monitoring of foreign influence in religious schools and other institutions, for one – Zaharan was an extraordinary outlier in a community that has been notably peaceful amid Sri Lanka’s political turmoil.
Nonetheless, the post-Easter backlash against Sri Lankan Muslims has been harsh and dangerous. Nationalist politicians and religious leaders from the majority Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-religious group have used the Easter attacks and the fears they provoked to reinforce a narrative blaming Muslims collectively for growing “extreme”. The government has allowed militant Sinhalese groups purportedly defending Buddhism to ramp up their post-war anti-Muslim campaign of economic boycotts, media pressure, and organised violence with impunity.
The months since the Easter bombings have seen island-wide boycotts of Muslim businesses, vigilante attacks on women wearing hijab, and old and new media rumour campaigns by Sinhala nationalist groups alleging Muslim plots to sterilise Sinhalese women. Two days of devastating riots targeting Muslim businesses and mosques in mid-May raised fears of an island-wide pogrom like the July 1983 anti-Tamil riots that led to all-out war.
Yet, instead of condemning the attacks and investigating the perpetrators, President Sirisena chose instead to release from prison a prominent extremist monk, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thera, who promptly joined anti-Muslim protests, issued threats, and rallied other monks to demand “a government that will protect the Sinhalese”.
Given that members of the small group behind the Easter bombings all appear to be dead or arrested, public fears of further jihadist attacks in the short term have receded.
But with dysfunction in the security services left largely unaddressed, and the country’s political and Sinhalese Buddhist religious leadership either oblivious or indifferent to the ill will they may be sowing with the nation’s law-abiding Muslim citizens, Sri Lanka is nonetheless taking steps down a dangerous path. It is past time to reverse course, lower communal tensions and focus on the critical and unfinished work of knitting together a fractured country.

JIHADIST NETWORK

The Sri Lankan network that supported and carried out the attacks was built around two families.
The more active and important of these centred around the Salafi preacher M.C.M. Zaharan (also known as Zaharan Hashim), who was killed in one of two suicide attacks at the Shangri-La Hotel. A well-known and controversial figure in his native town of Kattankudy in the eastern Batticaloa district, Zaharan was a charismatic and forceful Salafi preacher, but also a rebel and outsider. His own religious organisations cut ties with him due to his aggressive behaviour and rhetoric – beginning with the madrasa he studied in and later including National Tawhid Jamaat itself, which Zaharan had helped found.
At the time of the Easter bombings, Zaharan was not well known outside the small world of Kattankudy.
At the time of the Easter bombings, Zaharan was not well known outside the small world of Kattankudy and those following politicised Muslim networks, but he was already associated with a significant record of violence – raising questions about why the police failed to see the attack coming. Zaharan had been on the run from police since a brutal 10 March 2017 attack by NTJ members on followers of Sufi cleric Abdul Rauff Zein.
Subsequent reports suggested Zaharan’s students had vandalised Buddhist statues in the town of Mawanella in December 2018 – a small but unprecedented and symbolically important instance of violence by Muslims against Buddhist targets.
Next came the discovery of 100kg of explosives and weapons at a farm in the north-west town of Wanathavilluwa in January 2019 by police following leads from the suspected attackers in Mawanella. March 2019 saw the shooting of M.R.M. Taslim, an advisor to Minister Kabir Hashim, the ruling party parliamentarian for Mawanella, after Taslim helped police track down those who vandalised the statues.
In addition to Zaharan’s Kattankudy-based network, built around his family, the team that eventually carried out the Easter attacks also involved lesser-known Colombo-based radicals associated with the Jamathei Millathu Ibrahim (JMI) organisation. The key members in this group were two brothers – Ilham and Inshaf Ibrahim – from a prominent Colombo business family. Much or all of the money needed to fund the attack reportedly came from the Ibrahim brothers.
Those who knew and followed these networks were shocked that Zaharan and his supporters could have carried out such a complex and deadly series of bombings. The sophistication of the operation and the mass targeting of Christians – with whom Sri Lankan Muslims have no history of tensions – immediately led government and security experts to suspect international involvement.
This suspicion appeared to be confirmed two days after the attack when ISIS claimed responsibility, supported by photos and videos of the bombers with ISIS flags and pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
What is known so far suggests the bombers were inspired by the ISIS brand, eager for the high profile that ISIS affiliation would confer, and supported by several people outside Sri Lanka suspected of previous involvement with ISIS. Indeed, Zaharan shelved plans to attack Buddhist targets in favour of ISIS-inspired attacks on Christians and Western tourists, and the greater publicity and shockwaves this would cause.
In addition to the ISIS claim of responsibility, there is circumstantial evidence of possible links, including the sharing by at least one of the attackers of photos and videos for ISIS to publish after the attacks.
According to some reports, Zaharan met and received training from Indians who had fought with ISIS. Indian investigators also report evidence of connections between Zaharan and what they consider an ISIS cell based in the southern city of Coimbatore. One of the bombers, Abdul Lathief Jameel Mohamed, was reportedly suspected of communicating with a well-known ISIS fighter while studying in Australia, and may have travelled to Syria. Zaharan’s brother, Rilwan, who died in a 26 April police raid in Santhamaruthu, along with one of the Easter bombers, A.M.M. Hashtun, are believed to have received bomb-making training in Turkey.
Finally, a Sri Lankan software engineer, suspected by Indian intelligence of connections with ISIS, is now in custody in Colombo on suspicion of working with the Ibrahim brothers and Zaharan.
After the bombings, officials and journalists were struck by how long and how publicly Zaharan had been preaching in support of ISIS. In a well-attended – but later ignored – speech in Kattankudy in early 2017, he called on his listeners to support ISIS in Syria.
The speech triggered an anti-ISIS rally in Kattankudy on 3 February, and is likely the reason the NTJ formally expelled Zaharan in December 2017. In Zaharan’s case anti-Muslim attacks appear to have fed his increasingly lethal rage.
Experiencing violent discrimination rarely leads directly to seeking violent revenge, but in Zaharan’s case anti-Muslim attacks appear to have fed his increasingly lethal rage. Statements by police investigators and people who knew Zaharan indicate that anti-Muslim violence was one factor motivating Zaharan’s and his team’s increasing commitment to violence against other religious communities, or at a minimum used to justify that turn.
Following anti-Muslim riots in Kandy district in March 2018, Zaharan posted a video on his Facebook page calling for attacks on non-Muslims and police, which many Muslim religious and civil society leaders shared with police and senior government officials. That video and earlier ones Zaharan posted in February 2018, also denounced violent attacks on Muslims by Sinhalese Buddhist militants and threatened retaliation.
In the weeks following the attacks, police arrested more than two hundred people suspected of involvement in them, and uncovered multiple safe houses and training camps used by the bombers and their supporters.
On 14 June, Saudi Arabia extradited to Sri Lanka five suspected members of the bombing network, including Zaharan’s alleged deputy, Mohammed Milhan, also wanted for shooting minister Hashim’s secretary in Mawanella. Army Commander Lt. Gen. Mahesh Senanayake told parliament in late July that investigators had “confirmed reports” that some “extremists” had evaded arrest and are “still operating secretly”, and arrests of additional suspects continued through August. These included arrests of suspected members of Jamathei Millathu Ibrahim (JMI) who allegedly trained with Zaharan and were prepared to carry out more attacks.

-CRISIS GROUP REPORT