Sri Lanka Blames Local Group for Attacks but Suspects ‘International Network’

Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, was ravaged by decades of civil war that ended in 2009, but it has little history of militant Islamist violence. The suicide bombings that were pioneered there starting in the 1980s were carried out by guerrillas from the country’s Tamil ethnic minority who were mainly Hindu, not Muslims.

Anne Speckhard, the director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, contrasted the attacks by Tamil guerrillas with those attributed to National Thowheeth Jama’ath. Unlike the bombings on Sunday, she said, those during the civil war were part of a nationalist or ethnic separatist movement, and they mostly targeted political leaders rather than religious ones.

“These attacks appear to be quite different,” she said, “and look as if they came right out of the ISIS, Al Qaeda, global militant jihadist playbook, as these are attacks fomenting religious hatred by attacking multiple churches on a high religious holiday.”

National Thowheeth Jama’ath is a small but violent group of young Muslims that started at least three years ago in eastern Sri Lanka, far from the country’s more cosmopolitan western and southern coasts. Until this month, the group was generally perceived as anti-Buddhist, counterterrorism experts said.

Radical Islamist groups like Al Qaeda also have experience in organizing and carrying out simultaneous suicide attacks — most notably those in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

Local ties with such groups may have been strengthened in recent years by Sri Lankan Muslims who traveled to fight in wars in Syria and Iraq, said Sameer Patil, a national security fellow at Gateway House, a foreign policy research group in Mumbai, India. With the Islamic State having recently lost its last patch of territory in Syria, he said, the group’s foreign fighters are now more likely to return home to Sri Lanka and other countries.

“It was just a matter of time before that would hit them on their own soil,” Mr. Patil said.

Ms. Speckhard said the aim of National Thowheeth Jama’ath was to spread the global jihadist movement to Sri Lanka and to create hatred, fear and divisions in society.