As part of this investigation, ‘Logically’ identified three encrypted Telegram channels, two associated Facebook pages, and three YouTube channels operated by the group.
Ayushman Kaul
In an exclusive investigation, Logically has found that Farhatullah Ghauri, a terrorist recruiter and financier for Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a Pakistan-backed terror group, is using a network of accounts on Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube to amplify terrorist propaganda videos targeting religious minorities in the country. JeM is the group responsible for several terror attacks in India, including the February 2019 Pulwama bombing that led to the death of 40 Indian security personnel.
The network was identified by Logically before it could accrue a significant audience peaking with 200-400 subscribers across all the accounts. The terrorist propaganda has circulated across other encrypted messaging channels on Telegram, including those affiliated with Islamabad-backed proxy terror groups claiming to operate in the Kashmir region, such as the Hizbul Mujahideen and The Resistance Front.
Closer scrutiny of the amplification patterns of the videos on Facebook since January 2022 suggests a concerted attempt by malicious actors to post the videos in Facebook groups and pages dedicated to socialism, Islam, and minority rights. These groups are frequented by larger, more mainstream audiences of domestic users who are critical of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. Moreover, these coordinated online campaigns coincide with offline incidents of communal violence in the country, revealing how malicious actors abroad are leveraging major social media platforms to exploit domestic tensions and radicalise the minority population.
Who is Farhatullah Ghauri?
Farhatullah Ghauri is listed among 38 individuals as a terrorist by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (amended in 2019). Also known as Abu Sufiyan, Ghuar is originally from Kurmaguda district in Hyderabad and primarily known for being a terrorist financier. He fled to Saudi Arabia in 1994 and finally settled in Pakistan in 2015.
In addition to being a close associate of Masood Azhar, a United Nations designated terrorist and the founder of JeM, Farhatullah is personally implicated by Indian intelligence services for planning and facilitating a series of terror attacks in the country. These attacks include an improvised explosive device (IED) attack at Sai Baba Temple in Saroornagar in 2002, a fidayeen (suicide) attack on the Akshardham Temple complex in Gujarat the same year, a suicide bomb attack targeting the Hyderabad City Police Commissioner’s Task Force office at Begumpet in 2005 and the attempted assassination of Nallu Indrasena Reddy, an Indian politician and current national secretary of the BJP in 2017.
According to intelligence from Indian agencies, Ghauri facilitates and finances these attacks without actively participating in them. He also actively recruits and indoctrinates individuals, including funding their travel from India to Dubai and Pakistan for radicalisation and training.
In April 2022, The Print reported on how the fugitive financier had decided to shed decades of anonymity in favour of amplifying propaganda on social media by following a more overt approach towards recruitment centered on personal outreach within close circles mediated by clerics and family ties. Through this approach, he seeks to recruit Indian Muslims to carry out domestic terror attacks on behalf of several other groups, namely, Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), symbolic of a broader effort by jihadist groups to leverage popular digital communication platforms to appeal to a new generation of ‘Jihad volunteers’ by exploiting domestic communal tensions.
A clash of civilisations
As part of this investigation, Logically identified three encrypted Telegram channels, two associated Facebook pages, and three YouTube channels operated by the group.
The terrorist propaganda amplified via these channels consists of professionally edited videos with voice overs by Farhatullah Ghauri. Some of the videos engage with the rhetoric of Muslim minorities allegedly facing human rights violations by Indian security services in Jammu, Kashmir and other parts of the country. This is then complemented with graphic images and news coverage referencing historical and current incidents of sectarian violence in the country.
The videos often address policy decisions enacted by the present central government that affect the Indian-Muslim community, including the reading down of Article 370, the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), and the National Registry of Citizens (NRC). The semantics used in the videos cleverly aim to portray the Indian government as ‘Hindu Fascists’ locked in an inter-civilisational conflict against Muslims across the world. Finally, there are explicit calls by Ghauri to Indian Muslims to revolt and take up arms against the Indian state.
Other videos employ more overt appeals to religiosity by including references from Islamic theology, namely, Malhama Al-Kubra, an apocalyptical battle prophesied to signal armageddon and, Ghazwa-e-Hind (Holy war for India), an Islamic concept derived from the Hadiths that refers to Muslim warriors conquering the Indian subcontinent.
These references are paired with calls from the narrator for Indian Muslims to take up weapons and mount attacks against local politicians, civilians, and other ‘soft targets’ in India that are alleged to have blasphemed against Islam. The videos also implore Muslims abroad to engage in hijrah, a ‘holy pilgrimage’ to India to carry out terror attacks.
Troublingly, an analysis into the spread of the videos on Facebook between January 1 and July 1, 2022, via CrowdTangle, a social media analysis tool, reveals that videos from Ghauri’s network were amplified across several mainstream Facebook groups and pages devoted to Islam, socialism and minority rights in a bid to help the extremist content accrue a larger audience among a user base critical of the ruling political party, BJP. While platform officials took down these posts, the time-stamps on the posts in these groups and the use of similarly written captions and descriptions accompanying the video suggest the presence of a copypasta campaign by a single entity.
Courtesy : The Wire
Note: This news piece was originally published in thewire.com and used purely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes exclusively for Human Rights
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