Yeah... no.
In the most basic enabled attacks, Islamic State handlers acted as confidants and coaches, coaxing recruits to embrace violence. In the Hyderabad plot, among the most involved found so far, the terrorist group reached deep into a country with strict gun laws to arrange for pistols and ammunition to be left in a bag swinging from the branches of a tree.
There's nothing "remote" about that. The operatives managing the actual attacks had to be present right there in the country for that to be the case, and would have had to have a strong enough presence to be able to smuggle weapons and ammunition into the same. It's not like they shipped the weapons all the way to India from an Amazon warehouse or something.
What you're basically seeing here is an extended terrorist network extending INTO India and using the internet to hide its footsteps. The anonymity of the contacts is the story here, not their remoteness.
More importantly: this kind of management is only possible in the first place when the managers have very good intelligence on the ground and a network of personal connections extensive enough to be able to move people and materials from one place to another covertly. That necessarily implies those operatives would have to be VERY familiar with the areas they're planning to attack, and are only able to manage unfamiliar operatives by being able to describe very clearly what they're going to do and how they're going to do it.
Put this another way: you, being a pretty smart person, probably couldn't coordinate a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia. You don't know anyone in Saudi Arabia, you don't speak the language, you don't know local customs or shipping practices, and you definitely couldn't arrange for weapons and explosives to be hung from a tree in a park somewhere; you wouldn't even know what park to pick where that shit wouldn't draw attention.
You could, however, easily arrange that kind of attack in a city you live in. You know what soft targets could be attacked, you know what sort of things will and won't draw the attention of the police, you know about some of the hidden places and dark corners where someone might be able to make a weapon drop without being noticed. If you know the right people, you might even know who to talk to about getting your hands on restricted weapons and items. There's nothing "remote" about that kind of management; in that case you're an infiltrator managing the local strike team.
