The first Sinhalese (native Sri Lankans) arrived in Sri Lanka late in the 6th century B.C., probably from northern India.
Buddhism was introduced 250 B.C., and the first kingdoms developed at the cities of Anuradhapura (on eh rod a puor ah) (from circa 200 B.C. to circa A.D. 1000) and Polonnaruwa (polon ah ruwa) (from about 1070 to 1200).
In the 14th century, a south Indian dynasty established a Tamil (tah meal) kingdom in northern Sri Lanka. The Portuguese controlled the coastal areas of the island in the 16th century followed by the Dutch in the 17th century.
The island was ceded to the British in 1796, became a crown colony in 1802, and was formally united under British rule by 1815.
It became independent country of Ceylon in 1948; its name was changed to Sri Lanka in 1972.
Prevailing tensions between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil separatists erupted into war in July 1983. Fighting between the government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil continued for over a quarter century. Although Norway brokered peace negotiations that led to a ceasefire in 2002, the fighting slowly resumed and was again in full force by 2006. The government defeated the Tigers of Tamil in May 2009.
During the post-conflict years under President RAJAPAKSA, the government enacted an ambitious program of infrastructure development projects, many of which were financed by loans from the Government of China.
In 2015, a new coalition government headed by President SIRISENA of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party came to power with pledges to advance economic, governance, anti-corruption, reconciliation, justice, and accountability reforms; however, progress on many of these reforms has been uneven.
Population:
22,576,592 (July 2018 est.)
Religion
Buddhist (official) 70.2%, Hindu 12.6%, Muslim 9.7%, Roman Catholic 6.1%, other Christian 1.3%.
Government type
Presidential Republic
9 provinces; Central, Eastern, North Central, Northern, North Western, Sabaragamuwa, Southern, Uva, Western
Independence
4 February 1948 (from the UK)
Terrorism in Sri Lanka
A decade since the end of its civil war, Sri Lanka had been enjoying a period of relative peace and a boom in tourism. It was even ranked as the top country for travel in 2019.
However, the Easter Sunday bombings have been described by Sri Lankan officials as “a brand new type of terrorism”, while the death toll puts the attacks on a par with the deadliest atrocities since 9/11.
During its civil war (1983-2009), many terror attacks in Sri Lanka were attributed to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil or the Tamil Tigers.
According to the Global Terrorism Database, among the deadliest were an attack on Buddhist worshippers in May 1985 (146 killed), an ambush of three buses in April 1987 (126 killed) and an attack on two mosques in August 1990 (112 killed).
In 2006 the number of deaths from terrorism in Sri Lanka peaked, as 371 people were killed during the course of six terrorist incidents.
Sri Lanka’s demographics
Sri Lanka has a population of 20.3 million, according to the 2012 census. The majority ethnic group is Sinhalese, who make up almost three-quarters of the population (74.9%). Sri Lankan Tamils make up the largest minority group, with 11.1%.
Christianity is a minority religion in Sri Lanka, followed by just 7.6% of the population. The majority of the population are Buddhist (70.1%), with other minority religions being Hinduism (12.6%) and Islam (9.7%).
Christians, who were targeted in the attacks, tend to live mainly in the northern, north-western and western provinces of the country.
The attackers struck at three churches around the country and three luxury hotels in the capital, Colombo, early on Easter Sunday.
In the afternoon, as police hunted suspects, there were two more explosions near Colombo, one in a guesthouse and the other in what appears to have been the attackers’ safe house.
The deadliest attack was in the church of St Sebastian in Negombo, a satellite town just north of the capital. In the eastern town of Batticaloa, the bomber was prevented from entering the church by worshippers but killed at least 28 outside, many of them children. The third church hit was St Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo.
The three hotels hit in the first wave of attacks were the Cinnamon Grand, the Shangri-La and the Kingsbury.
The prime minister of Sri Lanka said a fourth hotel was also targeted, but the attack failed. He did not give further details, but sources said the man checked in to the hotel the day before the attack.
Sri Lankan authorities say least 253 people were killed and many were injured, some critically. The United Nations said at least 45 of the victims were children.
On 25 April, authorities revised the death toll down from an earlier estimate of 359, giving a grim explanation for the change: the force of the explosions had done so much damage to the victims’ bodies that it had been hard to get an accurate number of dead at first, health officials said. Forensic experts were dealing with “very complex” human remains.
The vast majority of the dead were Sri Lankan, but there were also at least 38 foreigners. They included British, Indian, Danish, Dutch, Swiss, Portuguese, Spanish, American, Australian and Turkish citizens.
So who did this?
The Islamic State claimed responsibility, with several days’ delay, but the attacks appear to have been organized by a previously obscure Sri Lankan extremist group, National Thowheed Jamath.
Investigators are now trying to determine the extent of any connections between Isis and the attack cell, looking at whether Isis mostly provided violent inspiration or whether its members or former fighters helped coordinate the attacks.
At least 32 Sri Lankans are known to have joined Isis in the Middle East. Most, like the Easter attackers, came from prosperous families.
Sri Lanka’s defense minister said there were nine suicide bombers in total. Eight have been identified, though Sri Lanka has not formally named them. One was a woman.
Two of the hotels were targeted by Inshaf and Ilham Ibrahim, two brothers who were the sons of one of Sri Lanka’s wealthiest spice traders. Ilham’s wife may have been the female suicide bomber.
One of the attackers has been identified as Abdul Jameel Mohamed, who studied in London and Australia.
The leader of the attacks was named as Mohammed Zaharan, a Sri Lankan Islamist preacher who had been expelled from his community for extremist views but who reached followers through video sermons on YouTube.
Zaharan was the only figure identifiable in a video of the Sri Lanka bombers pledging loyalty to Isis, released by the group’s news agency as it claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Investigators are looking into any international connections or support the bombers may have had, including whether they travelled to neighboring countries such as India or the Maldives for training.
Sri Lankan authorities have come under severe criticism for what appear to have been multiple and systemic intelligence failures before the attacks.
Indian security agencies warned their Sri Lankan counterparts more than four months ago that a network of violent Islamic extremists was active in the country and likely to commit terrorist attacks. At least some of that information came from a suspected Isis member detained in India.
More specific warnings that extremists were planning to attack churches, even including the names of some attackers, were circulated two weeks before the attacks. Sri Lanka’s president and prime minister have both said they did not see the warnings.
When the remnants of Al Qaeda were driven from Afghanistan in 2002, the group was also forced to become more decentralized, turning to foreign franchises in places like Yemen, Iraq and northern Africa to regenerate.
But unlike Al Qaeda then, the Islamic State already has numerous affiliates around the globe, an influential media ministry and thousands of fighters still underground in the group’s home base in Iraq and Syria.
As early as 2015, ISIS began instructing recruits to migrate to territory held by its overseas affiliates. And in a development sometimes missed by local officials abroad, it began signing up kindred local groups in distant outposts.
“Rather than building up membership from scratch, the group poaches members from existing hard-liner groups, or oftentimes the entire groups themselves,” wrote Rita Katz, a co-founder of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist propaganda.
In the Philippines, ISIS recruited insurgents from Abu Sayyaf to create what it considers its East Asia Province, which carried out an attack on a cathedral in January, killing 23 people. The ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan has swallowed whole units of Taliban fighters.
More recently, it cobbled together a new “province” in the Democratic Republic of Congo by recruiting members of the Allied Democratic Forces rebel group, which received cash transfers from an ISIS financier.
These groups have felt little impact from the loss of territory in Iraq and Syria, and need no direct communication from the Islamic State to understand its objectives, which the terrorist group broadcasts in regular audio messages.
They understand that the mission within their countries is to conduct operations against law enforcement, military and, yes, non-Muslim groups.
They also have local knowledge that can help identify holes in a country’s defenses — like the fact that after a 26-year military campaign against ethnic Tamil insurgents, most of whom are Hindu, Sri Lankan security officials were more focused on them than on Islamist extremists.
That blind spot may have contributed to Sri Lankan officials’ failure to act on warnings by Indian intelligence of a plot to bomb churches.
“When combined with ISIS’ technical know-how and expertise, the combination with the local knowledge of local groups can have devastating effects,” said Colin P. Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a research organization for global security issues.
The Islamic State remains a serious, violent threat.
And now that it has lost its safe haven in the Middle East, the Islamic State may be increasingly relying on the model it perfected abroad.
The group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has gone underground and is believed to communicate only by personal courier, but its fighters communicate freely by encrypted apps.
Despite the declarations of victory, the Islamic State’s insurgent campaign is steadily gaining momentum across Iraq and Syria, according to a new report by the Institute for the Study of War in Washington.
The report found that ISIS was ramping up attacks in parts of northern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan as well as in major cities that were once under its control, including Raqqa, Syria — its former capital — and Mosul and Falluja, Iraq.
Last week, in its biggest operation since losing its Syrian stronghold, the group carried out attacks against the Syrian Army and allied militias in central Syria, killing 35 soldiers over two days, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain.
As it has decentralized, ISIS has increasingly depended on its mass-media operation, which continues to spread its message around the world.
Every day since officials of the American-led military coalition touted the end of the caliphate, the group’s media operatives have issued claims of responsibility for attacks around the world.
On the same day as the Sri Lanka attack, for instance, ISIS issued a video showing Saudi jihadists pledging allegiance to Mr. al-Baghdadi before carrying out an assault near Riyadh and it published details of an attack by its Afghan affiliate on the country’s Ministry of Communications.
Because ISIS’s media machine capitalizes on every single sphere of operation, it looks to many of its followers as still a strong, global group. Followers wholeheartedly believe that the breakdown of their caliphate in Iraq and Syria is nothing but a temporary setback.
While the group’s production of high-end videos has declined, the constant stream of propaganda published around the clock in multiple time zones and languages suggests that ISIS’ media unit has a global network of editors and writers.
It is a redundancy that has allowed the operation to survive.
The Islamic State can still tap a large war chest to finance its global operations. It has $50 million to $300 million in cash either hidden in Iraq and Syria or smuggled into neighboring countries for safekeeping, according to a United Nations report released in February.
The terrorist group is still engaged in kidnapping for ransom, and is believed to have invested in legitimate businesses, including fish farming, car dealing and cannabis growing. Stealthily distributing the money abroad is a skill that the group has developed over the years, using proxies, cutouts and known middlemen, he said.
Decentralization makes it difficult to know the extent of the group’s involvement in attacks like the one in Sri Lanka.
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the bombings, but experts and the local authorities have yet to determine the extent of its ties to the local group said to have carried them out.
Until this week, the group, National Thowheeth Jama’ath, was an obscure organization best known for defacing Buddhist statues.
American intelligence officials have so far characterized the Sri Lanka attacks as having been inspired by the Islamic State, as opposed to having been executed directly by the group. But analysts say there may be some middle ground.
A video released by ISIS on Tuesday, showing members of National Thowheeth Jama’ath pledging fealty to Mr. al-Baghdadi, shows at the least that the group had a means of communicating with core ISIS operatives and was able to transmit video to them.
“The fact that the attackers knew the right people in ISIS to send the video to so that it would be released through its official media channel, shows that it’s more than mere inspiration,” an expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said on Twitter on Wednesday. “That’s just one of many pieces of info emerging pointing to a more directed attack.”
So far, there is no public evidence that ISIS played an active role in guiding or otherwise aiding the Sri Lanka attack.
The attack was among the deadliest ever carried out by Islamic State followers outside Iraq and Syria.
That the group responsible for it existed so far below the radar of international intelligence agencies troubles counterterrorism officials, who wonder how many similar groups are active or operating secretly in North Africa, South Asia and elsewhere.
Current and former counterterrorism officials warned that the Sri Lanka bombings may be a harbinger for a new phase of ISIS attacks.
“Former ISIS fighters and sympathizers are rebranding themselves ideologically with other terrorists,” said Christopher P. Costa, who was a senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council under the Trump administration. “It’s not just a question of the loss of a physical caliphate so much as considering exactly what ISIS will look like as it tries to reconstitute itself.”
“We will see more of these kinds of attacks in the future,” he said.
Now I’ve told you where Sri Lanka is located and a little of its history. So when you watch the evening news coverage of this, you will have a better idea of what they are talking about.
However, the big story behind all this is the branching out of ISIS and its ability to recruit worldwide.
Look at the dissention we currently face within our own country. Are we fertile ground for a generation of home grown terrorists to follow in the footsteps of the Tamil Tigers? If so, What can we do about it?
In a country that prides itself on freedom of speech, are you willing to sacrifice some of your privacy on the internet, twitter, or cell phone? I am.
Obviously, ISIS is using the world of high tech media and communication to further their cause.
Can you imagine how the Confederate guerillas in Missouri during the Civil War could have utilized such a vast communication network to recruit members and further their cause?
Maybe they could see what the future held, since they spent a tremendous amount of time tearing down wires and burning telegraph poles connecting the various Union forts throughout the state.
Just like those guerillas, ISIS has no major military base of operations. No forts to capture. They are highly mobile. They recruit from the area of operations and they both blend silently into the local community.
Most importantly, they learned to adapt as conditions changed.