Indonesian maids working in Hong Kong are being lured by terrorists from the Daesh terror group, a security think-tank said in a report Wednesday.

Around 150,000 of the city's domestic helpers are from Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority country.

A small number of terrorist maids has emerged over the past years, a report from the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) suggested.

But rights activists and the Indonesian Muslim community in Hong Kong said they were unaware of terrorists and fear that reported links with Daesh would breed unfair suspicion.

The IPAC investigation revealed that around 45 Indonesian domestic helpers may have been attracted to terrorist circles by "the search for a sense of community in an unfamiliar environment."

IPAC analyst Nava Nuraniyah said that some of these women were drawn by Daesh-linked boyfriends they met online.

"But some joined Daesh as a path to empowerment," Nuraniyah added.

A string of abuse cases has highlighted the exploitation of maids in Hong Kong by unscrupulous employment agencies which confiscate their passports, claim their wages and keep them in the dark about their rights.

However, the IPAC report said ill-treatment did not seem to have played a direct role in the recruitment of the maids.

The war in Syria has fueled interest in terror groups as social media accounts affiliated with these groups stoked sympathy for Sunni victims, the report said.

It told the story of one woman who turned to terrorism after years of turmoil in her personal life and became a key player in helping Indonesian Daesh members to travel to Syria, sometimes via Hong Kong.

IPAC, a leading think-tank which has published numerous reports on conflicts in Southeast Asia, also said that a handful of maids ended up going to Syria themselves,

Hong Kong media has previously reported about Daesh supporters leafleting Indonesian domestic helpers as they gathered in public spaces across the city on Sundays, their day off.

One heavily pregnant maid who went missing in 2015 was said to have told friends she was planning to link up with Daesh terrorists in Syria alongside her husband, according to the South China Morning Post.

The Indonesian community in Hong Kong has tripled in the past 17 years due to the demand for domestic helpers, and religious teaching and prayer groups have grown alongside it.

Indonesian migrant rights activist and former domestic helper Eni Lestari said while the threat of terrorism was always a possibility, she was unaware of Daesh supporters among them.

"I think it's really unfair for the Indonesian domestic worker community to be labelled," Lestari told AFP.

Indonesia has long struggled with terrorism and hundreds from the Southeast Asian state have flocked to fight with the Daesh terror group.