Youth from Mumbai who joined ISIS alive, wants to return home
A 23-year-old Indian youth from Kalyan near Mumbai thought to have died three months ago fighting for the Islamic State is alive and wants to be rescued, his father has told the National Investigation Agency.
A 23-year-old Indian youth from Kalyan near Mumbai thought to have died three months ago fighting for the Islamic State (IS) is alive and wants to be rescued, his father has told the National Investigation Agency.
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Authoritative government sources said that Ejaz Majid had met senior NIA officers last Thursday in Mumbai and told them he had received a phone call from a mobile phone (number withheld, with a country code in East Europe). It was his son Areeb, who told him he had fled from IS-controlled areas to Turkey after fighting for the terrorist group, formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, for nearly three months.
Now Majid has sought the help of the Narendra Modi government to evacuate the jihadist from Turkey. This request has been conveyed at the highest levels and security agencies are verifying the November 20 call.
On May 23 this year, Areeb and three fellow civil engineering students -- Aman Naeem Tandel, Fahad Tanveer Shaikh and Sahim Farooq Tanki —went missing from Kalyan and flew with a group of pilgrims to Iraq. Radicalised over the Internet, the four joined IS’s campaign to create a Caliphate in Iraq and Syria. On August 26, Tanki called up Majid and told him that his son had become a “martyr”, and Pakistan-based terrorist group Anwar ul Tawhid declared Areeb’s martyrdom on its now-defunct website.
The sources said that Areeb requested his father, a homeopath, to make arrangements for his return to India as he had run out of money. Areeb wanted either the Indian mission in Ankara to seek him out or the consulate in Istanbul to help evacuate him to India.
Last Saturday at the HT Leadership Summit, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval had gone on record saying that no more than 10 Indian Muslims had gone to participate in jihad waged by IS in Iraq and Syria.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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