Geopolitics, Disinformation and the Weaponisation of Religion at the centre of the Indian Ocean
By Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka | 11 April 2026 (IDN) — The United States torpedo of the Iranian ship, IRIS Dena, in the Seas of Sri Lanka last month revealed geopolitical economic continuities with a crime committed seven years ago: The 2019 Islamic State or ISIS-claimed Easter Sunday terror attacks at 6 different sea-front locations that killed more than 250 people. Then, as now, the Mastermind of the crime was hidden in plain sight.
The Easter attacks of 2019 killed four Chinese marine research scientists at the Kingsbury hotel, which overlooks the Colombo harbour- South Asia’s busiest port. This resulted in the Chinese Research Vessel- Shi Yan-3, which was docked in the Colombo Port, abandoning its mission and returning immediately to China. The Chinese research team was collaborating with the National Aquatic Research Agency (NARA), on a project in the Eastern Seas off Lanka.
In recent years, the United States government, with India as a junior partner, has not kept its interest in preventing the Chinese Superpower’s research vessels from visiting Sri Lanka a secret. So too, the US has demonstrated an enduring interest in the Indian Ocean’s Maritime Domain. Now it has gone a step further to sink an Iranian ship in the Seas of Sri Lanka. The geostrategic island is located at the centre of Indian Ocean energy, trade and submarine data cable routes.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the Islamic State (ISIS) claimed Easter Sunday attacks on seafront hotels and churches in 2019 had the same signature and similar geopolitical economic interests to the sinking of Iran’s IRIS Dena last month.
The Easter 2019 attacks were a complex logistical operation – suicide attacks in 6 different sea-front locations. There were no inland targets selected by the bombers who hit coastal cities on the East and West coasts of the island–Batticaloa, Colombo, and Negombo.
Broadly, the Indian Ocean Maritime Domain was the focus of attention and action. Retrospectively, the security lockdown that followed appeared to be a dry run for extended Covid-19 lockdowns of harbours and fisheries communities in 2020. Local communities were deprived of access to their ocean resources and impoverished by the cascading disaster.
The Disinformation Game: Cover-up Investigations and Global-Local Psy-Ops
Were the Chinese scientists who died in the Easter attacks along with 250 others, much like the Iranian Naval band musicians who were killed by a US torpedo after participating in an Indian Fleet review ceremony last month– collateral damage in the crimes of a sinking empire?
The Sri Lankan intelligence agencies aided by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other foreign intelligence agencies including Australia’s ASIO and India’s RAW, as well as, politicians, researchers and media have assiduously promoted the narrative that there were NO external actors, geopolitical interests, or foreign Mastermind behind the 2019 ISIS-claimed Easter attacks in Sri Lanka that killed over 250 people.
Rather, a coordinated local and international blame game has unfolded among national agencies and politicians. Numerous cover-up investigations were conducted over the past seven years amid contradictory messaging from the Catholic Church. There was also a Channel 4 film to generate a smoke-screen of disinformation.
Remarkably, this Easter week, the United States directed every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against propaganda, and endorsed Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool to help do it.[i]The cable, signed by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, also suggested that embassies and consulates work alongside the US military’s psychological operations unit to address the problem of rampant disinformation.[ii]
Common Geopolitical Economic Pattern in the Crimes
There is a common thread, pattern, motives and interests in these two crimes committed in Geostrategic Sri Lanka- Easter 2019 and IRIS Dena 2026. They involved foreign actors and networks with local collusion. These include conducting cover-up investigations to confuse and spread disinformation, masking the external motives, mastermind, and foreign intelligence networks behind the crime, as well as local collusion.
Then as now, the same confusing signals about Indian intelligence complicity in US crimes in Sri Lanka were apparent. The Iranian IRIS Dena was in South Asian waters because it had come for an Indian Fleet Review ceremony in Nagapattinam and was returning to Iran when it was sunk in Sri Lanka’s exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) by a US torpedo.
Only, now the masks and gloves are off. The wretched, crashing superpower no longer hides its crimes, and the 800 military bases around the world that support destabilising countries behind a mask of human rights and democracy talk. Still, the propaganda, disinformation and psychological operations unfold.
The Easter Sunday 2019 attacks in Sri Lanka killed people of many nationalities and injured many more. Last month’s sinking of the IRIS Dena in the seas of Sri Lanka killed 84 Iranian sailors and caused environmental damage, which local activists and the United Nations have tended to ignore.
Messages to China and Iran: Does the US own the Indian Ocean?
While subsequent investigations into the Easter attacks have focused on the local suicide bombers and their networks, the question remains: Were the suicide bombers led by Zaharan Hashim of the obscure National Towheed Jamat (NTJ) organisation, following a script delivered to them via remote social media platforms that purvey Online-Religiosity?
Was the Religion Bot, code-named Sonic-Sonic, purportedly living in Malaysia, designed to hide CIA and Mossad intelligence agents and networks that are skilled in weaponizing religion/s spirituality and the occult, with remote funding and Online recruitment of terrorist networks? Here, Rand Corporation Anthropologist Jonah Blank’s book “Mullahs on the Mainframe” may be instructive. After all, it is obvious that an ISIS-linked Mastermind would not blow himself up in the first attack.
Were the 2019 Easter attacks that aborted the Chinese research vessel’s visit to Sri Lanka primarily to send a strong message to the rising Asian Superpower? Retrospectively, it seems clear that the Easter crime was a geopolitical economic event and a message to a third country—Hands off geostrategic Sri Lanka—the US owns the Indian Ocean —with or without the “String of Pearl” harbours?!
Of course, the Easter 2019 attacks were also carefully designed to crash Sri Lanka’s economy and precipitate a journey towards neocolonial Eurobond US dollar debt entrapment. Indeed, they were perfectly timed to “Make the Economy Scream” and ‘pump and dump’ the country.
The Easter attacks on luxury hotels and the tourist-dependent economy happened just after the World Bank had upgraded Sri Lanka to an Upper ‘Middle Income Country’ (MIC Trap). This forced the country to resort to borrowing at predatory interest rates on private capital Eurobond markets when the disaster struck, as MICs are ineligible for concessionary borrowing.
At the time, the national poverty rate was a mere 4.1 per cent. Today, there are claims that Sri Lanka’s poverty rate is 25 per cent, and the lender of last resort, the IMF, is its saviour! This is despite Sri Lanka being the wealthiest country in South Asia by all metrics except the exorbitantly privileged US dollar.[iii] The propaganda narratives intrinsic in the ADB-WB-IMF-funded Research Industry honed in contradictory messaging are showing.
The Easter attacks were also designed to weaponise ethno-religious identity politics in the multicultural island nation, with rumours that Muslim women suicide bombers were buying white attire to target Buddhist temples. All this provided a smoke-screen to mask hybrid economic warfare on the geostrategic island, now caught in a neocolonial International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Eurobond Debt trap.
The geostrategic country has effectively lost its economic sovereignty and policy autonomy to the Washington Consensus at this time, given the cascading impacts of various exogenous economic disasters and staged mental and material impoverishment.
Disinformation Game: CIA and Mossad’s Islamic Terror Catspaw:
The sinking of the IRIS Dena in Sri Lanka’s EEZ clearly shows that the country remains in the cross hairs of big power rivalry in the Indian Ocean and is subject to various forms of hybrid economic warfare, including Geoengineering. The island is also afloat in Disinformation and cover-up investigations to conceal the geopolitical-economic motives behind crimes committed on land and at sea.
However, masking the Indian Ocean Geopolitical economic interests and targets of the attacks is more difficult as the War in the Middle East has extended to South Asia, with the Indian Ocean and oil-rich Middle East emerging as the epicentre of conflict as World War 3 ramps up.
After all, it is hardly a secret that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which claimed ownership of the Easter Carnage in 2019 in Buddhist and Hindu-dominated Sri Lanka, was set up and is part-owned by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). ISIS was set up after the invasion of Iraq on false pretences in 2003, in order to conduct a regime in Syria– as part of the ‘Greater Israel’ project. Hence the name Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The US and UK claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to justify invasion and regime change in Iraq was proved False.
As Columbia University Professor Jeff Sachs, among others, has revealed, ISIS was set up by the CIA and US special forces occupying Iraq to carry out regime change in neighbouring Syria against then-President Assad, after the Iraqi army was disbanded. Hence the name Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — ISIS. Since then, ISIS terror attacks have proliferated around the world with ISIS avatars and the Greater Israel Abraham accords to enable Israel to take over parts of Syria and Iraq have unfolded.
These continuities illuminate the foreign hands and interests behind the ISIS-claimed Easter Sunday attacks of 2019 and the recent attack on the Iranian Ship in Sri Lanka.
Intelligence Agency Kompromat? Mastermind hidden in Plain Sight
Notwithstanding the coordinated international and local propaganda and Disinformation in the corporate and social media echo chamber to hide the external geopolitical economic motives in the Easter Sunday attacks of 2019, it is clear that a group of homegrown local terrorists could not have conducted such a logistically complex operation. There were simultaneous explosions in 6 different locations on the East and West coasts of Sri Lanka:
Indeed, it is now quite clear that the external ‘Mastermind’ of the 2019 Easter Sunday carnage remains hidden in plain sight – and continues to wreak havoc, including sinking ships in Sri Lanka and across the Indian Ocean world.
The illegal US-Israeli war on Iran, with US warships circling in the Indian Ocean, and the British-occupied Chagos Islands with the Diego Garcia military base, are an indicator of continuing attempts by the world’s biggest Rogue State to exert control over Indian Ocean energy, trade and submarine data cable routes. This is also to shore up the Petrodollar and its global reserve currency status, for which control of Sea Lanes of Communication (SLOC) across the Indian Ocean is seen to be vital. Hence Trumps desperation to ‘open’ the straits of Hormuz and secure oil flow from the Persian Gulf.
While promoting the narrative of a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific, ’ the US has attempted to claim dominance of the Indian Ocean, also with monsoon and seabed geoengineering, using weather warfare as a ‘force multiplier’ as part of hybrid economic warfare. At this time, it has assembled its environment-polluting war machine in the Indian Ocean to target Iran.
A foreign Script and Mastermind with local collateral damage?
Were the people who died in hotels and churches collateral damage in the Superpower’s power projection in a small island country in order to warn China, which has been subject to much propaganda about ‘debt trap’ lending to the Global South, that it must lay off Sri Lanka?
The Easter attacks symbolically targeted the Chinese Port city project by attacking St. Antony’s church that overlooks the Colombo harbour – South Asia’s busiest port. The lead suicide bomber, Zaharan Hashim and a second bomber died at the Chinese-owned Shangri-La Hotel. Both overlook the Colombo Harbour and the Chinese port city. The adjacent Hilton Hotel, between Kingsbury and Shangi La were spared.
No one dares to name the Superpower as a Criminal Actor and call out its crimes, not even the Catholic Church, which is full well acquainted with its Cold War weaponisation of religion/s at this time?
Thus another Easter has come and gone without the Foreign Mastermind of the ISIS-claimed Easter Sunday bombings of hotels and churches being revealed in Sri Lanka. Rather, endless cover up investigations of the Geopolitical interests writ large in the design of the Easter 2019 crime scene have unfolded by local investigative institutions and the church itself in collusion with their foreign counterparts.
Every attempt has been made to muddy the waters with local blame games and Disinformation to hide the external Mastermind behind ISIS-claimed attacks of 2019 in Sri Lanka.
The collusion of local institutions and political actors with external intelligence agencies, particularly the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which removed the cell phones of the bombers, continues. But the geopolitical economic targets of the attack are clear, as the standoff between the United States and China has ramped up since 2019.
Once we recognise the Geopolitical dimension of the ISIS claimed attacks it is easy to identify the Mastermind: A foreign intelligence agency which has long used ISIS as an alibi to weaponise Sunni Islam with Israeli Mossad as a partner in crime, for which the Zion Church in Batticaloa was hit in an own goal in the Easter attacks of 2019.
Israel’s Mossad has a long history in the Batticaloa, Arugam Bay and the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka, starting with the Mahaveli Development project in the late seventies and military bases set up to train Special Forces 1983 onwards –as reveal by ex-Mossad officer, Victor Ostrovsky in his book “By Way of Deception”.
The CIA and Israel’s Mossad have a long track record of promoting Islamist terror groups for regime change operations. Last year, Ahmed Al Sharaa (nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Julani), who headed the ISIS offshoot Al Nusra, became President of Syria following a regime change operation against Syrian President Bashar al- Assad. Al Sharaa, famous for ‘head-chopping’ with a recently lifted US bounty on his own head, was welcomed by Donald Trump in the White House last November! [IDN-InDepthNews]
Related article:
https://indepthnews.net/two-years-on-geopolitics-of-the-2019-easter-sunday-crime-in-sri-lanka-and-cover-up/
[i] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/30/embassies-campaign-marco-rubio-elon-musk
[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/30/embassies-campaign-marco-rubio-elon-musk
[iii] The metrics include: Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), GDP per capita, Human Development Index (HDI), Social Development Index (SDI), Physical Quality of Life Index or PQLI etc),