SWJ Book Review – Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre

SWJ Book Review – Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre

John P. Sullivan

Rohan Gunaratna, Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday massacre: lessons for the international communitySingapore: Penguin Books, 2023 (ISBN: 978-9814954631, paperback, 314 pages)

On Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019, the Islamic State (IS) devastated Sri Lanka with several coordinated attacks on churches and three international hotels, killing at least 290 people and injuring hundreds. Among the dead were at least 45 foreigners, three policemen and eight suicide bombers. The anatomy of this deadly sequence is the focus of Professor Rohan Gunaratna’s text Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday massacre.

Dr. Gunaratna is a renowned terrorism researcher and Professor of Security Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technology University Singapore, and founder of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research. He received his PhD from the University of St Andrews in Scotland and was a Senior Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Gunaratna’s previous publications include Inside Al-Qaida: Global Network of Terror (Columbia University Press, 2002). He was a witness before the 9/11 Commission and is an expert on radical Salafist jihadism.

Anatomy of the Massacre

Gunaratna offers a comprehensive and meticulous review of the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka. His assessment is comprehensive, providing insight into the architects and agents who planned and carried out the attacks, and describing the social divisions fomented by radical Salafi-Wahhabi jihadists that enabled the attack cells to operate. Gunaratna begins his timeline with a comprehensive, annotated timeline of the events surrounding the attacks. This chronology begins before 2015 and explains the fundamentals of the radical movement, then moves on to the key events from 2015 to 2019 that led to the attacks described for each year. The timeline extends from the attack to January 2023 and reports its aftermath. The detailed chronology makes the following introduction and subsequent chapters accessible to lay readers. The saga continues with an introduction to ISIS and its ideological framework, including its emphasis (or Mode of operation) Attacks on places of worship. The roots of IS activity in Sri Lanka – including hostility towards Sri Lanka’s indigenous Sufi Islam – and the aim of carrying out large-scale attacks across the island provide the context for the final sequence of attacks: the Easter Sunday attacks on churches in Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa.

Although terrorism (and insurgency) was nothing new to Sri Lanka, the country had survived a 30-year campaign by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil EelamThe Tamil Tigers were innovators of suicide terrorism with a history of assassinations and attacks on the police, but this globally networked religious terrorism with sectarian mass violence was new to Sri Lanka. The aim of Gunaratna’s work was to “tracing the emergence, the evolution of the threat, the setbacks, the government’s response and the lessons from the Easter Sunday attacks” (p. ixxv). He succeeds in doing this masterfully, as the book’s four main chapters show:

• “Chapter 1: The Anatomy of the Easter Attack” details why the Easter Sunday attack was a turning point in the island nation’s history. The attacks were driven by revenge and anger over perceived insults to the attackers’ Islamic ideals. In addition, this chapter details the sequence of attacks and the targets: St. Anthony’s Church, Colombo, 8:45 a.m.; St. Sebastian’s Church, Negombo, 8:45 a.m.; Zion Church, Batticaloa, 9:05 a.m.; Kingsbury Hotel, Colombo, 8:47 a.m.; Shangri-La Hotel Colombo, 8:54 a.m.; Cinnamon Grand Hotel, 9:12 a.m. A broader target of 20 targets across the island was originally planned, but the target was then reduced. The final attack included four hotels, but one failed because the bomb did not detonate. Nine suicide bombers, including a woman, were involved. Scope, timing, attack plan, attack preparation (target hulls), target selection (churches and hotels), supply chain (explosive construction), coordination, and operational security are discussed in Chapter 1.
• “Chapter 2: The Life and Death of Zahran Hashin” describes the foundations of ISIS in Sri Lanka, beginning with the legacy of Zahran Hashim, an Islamic State planner and ideologue. The chapter traces Hashin’s path as he “became politicized, radicalized and mobilized through three phases of exclusivism, extremism and terrorism” (p. 60). The chapter describes the rise of a jihadist center and a Tamil Nadu variant of Wahhabism (pp. 70-79) and finally the National Thowheeth Jama’ath or NTJ, which is suspected of involvement in the Easter Sunday attacks and ISIS.
• “Chapter 3: The Colombo Team and the Sri Lankan IS Division” describes the consolidation of disparate Muslim extremists in eastern and western Sri Lanka into a cohesive entity, bringing together Salafi-Wahhabi and Jamaican factions from the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent into a converging threat. The ideological underpinnings (from JMI, Jamiyathul Millathu Ibrahimi Fi Seylani to IS) and the processes of radicalization and convergence into a branching network are outlined, and the key players of the movement are examined to define the development of an operational capacity in Sri Lanka around the Colombo cell.
• “Chapter 4: Lessons and Reflections from Easter Sunday” provides a summary of the attack, its genesis and its aftermath. This includes a comprehensive context of the political climate before and after the tragedy. Embedded in the political climate are the challenges of religious exclusivism and extremism. This final chapter also looks at the post-attack investigations and lessons for Sri Lanka and the world at large.

Diploma: Lessons from the tragedy in Sri Lanka

The Massacre on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka– and the intelligence failures it describes that may have enabled the Easter Sunday attacks – provides valuable insight as the global IS movement continues to reinvigorate and metastasize. Gunaratna does a good job of describing the political fallout, recapping the various investigations that examined the incident and the government’s response (or failures to effectively prevent and detect emerging threats) (p. 210). These include the non-public Report of the Special Investigation Commission (SBI); Special Supervisory Committee (SOC); Report of the Special Committee of Parliament (PSC); and Presidential Committee of Inquiry (PCoI). The last three are publicly available. All of them would be valuable resources to provide much-needed transparency about the events leading up to the attacks and the gaps in government preparedness that amplified or enabled the attacks. Their mention in this text is important. A detailed follow-up assessment of all four reports – assuming a public version of the SBI could be released – would be a good starting point for understanding the future implications of the jihadist threat in Sri Lanka in particular and in South Asia (and the Indo-Pacific region) in general.

Gunaratna has identified the need for well-developed intelligence capabilities and organs to counter terrorist threats, national security leadership, and legal (and policy) frameworks to prevent and contain future attacks. These are sound and valid recommendations. In summary, Gunaratna provides a comprehensive and succinct account of the development of an IS branch with the capacity to conduct significant terror operations at a devastating human cost. He also implicitly exposes gaps in Sri Lanka’s police, intelligence, and national security capabilities following the Tamil (LTTE) insurgency. Those interested in countering IS (and its predecessor al-Qaeda), as well as future variants of these political forms of violence, would be well advised to read Professor Gunaratna’s excellent text. Scholars and practitioners of terrorism, counterterrorism, intelligence, and policing would benefit from this text as it provides useful insights into the emergence and evolution of new threat groups and their path to violent action.