The country's past as a recruitment hotbed for global Islamist jihad returns to haunt its future as it grapples with a new wave of terror
SALEEM SAMAD
Bangladesh is still coming to grips with
the exceptional brutality of its worst terrorist outrage, the horrific Black
Friday attack at Dhaka's Holey Artisan cafe on July 1. Twenty hostages,
including 18 foreign nationals and two policemen, were killed when the six
terrorists, said to be an IS-affiliated group, took them hostage. Indian
teenager, Tarishi Jain, was among those who were shot, had their throats slit
and bodies mutilated.
Five of the six terrorists were shot dead after security
forces stormed the cafe following a 10-hour standoff. The sixth survived and is
being interrogated by security forces.
What has shocked Bangladeshis is the
profile of the terrorists. Mostly in their early 20s, they were products of the
country's upper middle class elite (one was the son of a senior member of the
ruling Awami League party. Some are even believed to have been regulars at the
two-storeyed cafe located in Dhaka's upscale Gulshan area.
The attack marked
the debut of what has been the prototype home-grown terrorist in recent times,
well-educated and well-versed in using social media tools, fitting the
cosmopolitan profile terrorist outfits like Al Qaeda and IS have used in recent
terror attacks from Paris to Istanbul. "Gone are the madrasa recruits from
the impoverished rural countryside," says Humayun Kabir, senior research
director at the Dhaka-based think-tank, Bangladesh Enterprise Institute.
The attack was the culmination of a wave of
atrocities by unidentified machete-wielding assailants against the country's
religious minorities. Hindus, Buddhists and Christians priests, bloggers,
writers, publishers and moderate Muslims. Islamic extremists have killed over
40 people in such attacks since 2013. Over 16,000 people were arrested in a
crackdown in June this year but clearly it was a little too late.
Typically,
the government's response has been one of disbelief. "Anyone who believes
in religion cannot do such an act," Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh
Hasina said on July 2. "They do not have any religion. Their only religion
is terrorism."
A day after the attack, IS posted
photographs showing five of the youth posing in front of the group's black
flags, claiming credit for the attack. Bangladesh officials, however, are still
calling it the work of local militants.
If Black Friday exposed the chinks in the
country's security system, it also exposed the government's refusal to
recognise the Muslim radicals in their midst. "Hasina used to scoff at
claims of homegrown Islamist terrorists linked to the global terror network,"
says columnist Syed Badrul Ahsan. "She blamed opposition leader Khaleda
Zia for harbouring terrorists."
Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal had
termed the spate of killings over the past year as isolated incidents. He
clearly had no inkling of what was coming. "It was a time bomb waiting to
explode," says liberation war veteran Sachin Karmaker.
Bangladesh's
history of state-backed radicalisation dates back to the late 1970s and can be
traced specifically to the close ties between the Bangladesh Nationalist Party
and the Jamaat-e-Islami whose leaders had participated in the genocide of 1971.
In the 1980s, 8,000 Bangladeshi youth, many of them left and socialist-leaning,
volunteered to fight for the Palestine Liberation Organisation, a year after
Yasser Arafat visited Dhaka to a warm welcome from media and political circles.
Most of them returned home after the defeat and expulsion from Lebanon in 1982.
Soon after 9/11, over a thousand Bangladeshi nationals who had joined the
Taliban, fled to Pakistan when the American coalition invaded Afghanistan.
Since then, Bangladesh has been convulsed with the attempts of the Afghan
veterans to launch a jihad in their native country.
Counter-terrorism security agencies have
had some success in the past, which the present Hasina regime, in power since
2008, has had too, dismantling some terror cells. The Jamaat-ul Mujahideen
Bangladesh (JMB) spilled over into the neighbouring Indian states of West
Bengal and Assam. Since then, possibly with the full knowledge of domestic
security agencies, hundreds of Bangladeshi fighters, most of them poor rural
youth, have joined secret wars in 36 countries, from Chechnya in Russia to Aceh
in Indonesia.
The new phase of Bangladesh's war with
itself began in the wave of the recent machete attacks. In most cases, the
purpose of the attacks and the identities of the perpetrators remain a mystery.
An international outcry forced the government to respond by banning a dozen
Islamist outfits, including the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), believed to be
behind the blogger attacks. However, the fact is that both the Hasina and
earlier Khaleda Zia governments have harboured Islamist groups at some point
and refrained from antagonising the clerics. Both have also backed off from
implementing policies like women's empowerment and a national education policy
(religious parties call it anti-Islamic).
Counter-terrorism specialists say
Bangladesh is unprepared for this new form of terrorism. Online recruiters use
social media to recruit their targets. Sleeper cells in the heart of the cities
and towns run on small budgets, secret safehouses hide would-be jihadists while
the familiarisation and adaptation jigs are on. Recruiters spend cash to
procure weapons and bombs from gun-runners. It's during the internship that the
future jihadists carry out the hit-and-run machete attacks. The reward for a
good performance is a promotion to the sleeper cells, explains Kabir.
An unknown number of militants have escaped
police dragnets to join IS in Syria and Iraq. The Bangladesh Counter-Terrorism
and Intelligence Bureau, a CIA-trained outfit, does not know the exact number
as yet. It does not know how many may have travelled to the terror hotspots to
join IS . It does not know how many have returned either. Just as it doesn't
know how many attackers like the Black Friday six are waiting to strike.
First published in India Today magazine,
July 7, 2016
Saleem Samad, an Ashoka Fellow (USA), is an award winning investigative journalists and Special Correspondent of The Asian Age, published from Dhaka, Bangladesh
