How Hasina, with India’s support, broke the back of Pak-sponsored terror in Bangladesh

SALEEM SAMAD

Bangladesh is presently at low ebb on militancy by Muslim extremists with or without links to the international terror network.

But top terrorism researchers and anti-terrorism police officials do not rule out any possibility of visitation of terrorism in the country, especially by the home-grown Islamic jihad.

Two secretive groups, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and Ansarul Islam, presently dominate Bangladesh’s jihadist landscape, a top Counter Terrorism & Transnational Crime (CTTC) official confirmed who declined to be identified for security reasons.

Since 2015, two jihadist groups have targeted foreigners, secularists, intellectuals, religious, and sectarian minorities, and other perceived opponents, writes International Crisis Group.

In the last decade, despite widespread acts of violence by Islamic extremists, officially Bangladesh had always denied the presence of international jihadist forces inside its borders.

“There’s no Islamic State [ISIS] in Bangladesh,” declared Bangladesh Prime Minister and Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina in February 2016.

This does not imply that Bangladesh can lower its guard on terrorism and no country can afford to do so, says Prof Imtiaz Ahmed, a high-profile researcher on terrorism and violent extremism.

Sheikh Hasina’s government adopted zero-tolerance for terrorism, with several institutions dedicated to countering and preventing terrorism and violent extremism in Bangladesh, says Prof Ahmed of Dhaka University.

Nearly two decades ago, security and intelligence specialists at a conference of Intelligence Summit at Pentagon City, Washington DC predicted that Bangladesh will become the next epicentre for terrorism and jihad unless Bangladesh authority takes steps to contain the imminent crisis. During the same period, similar warnings were given by the New York Times and Washington Post.

Bangladesh nationals have joined terror hotspots in 36 countries. Hundreds of the recruits in different periods boarded flights from Dhaka international airport, with full knowledge of security agencies.

Since the 1980s, for three decades, nondescript militants from Bangladesh or trained in Bangladesh entered Afghanistan, Chechnya, Egypt, Aceh province in Indonesia, Jammu & Kashmir, Malaysia, Myanmar, Mindanao in the Philippines and other Muslim countries where jihadists were active.

Earlier concerned people and national media often interpreted that the radicalised militants are recruited from among the illiterate rural population, pointing their fingers at students who studied in tens of thousands of Madrassa (Islamic schools) spread all over Bangladesh.

Exiled Bangladesh-origin feminist author Taslima Nasreen, rubbished the arguments that poverty makes somebody a terrorist.

Well, political scientist Prof Ahmed has conducted an in-depth study ‘Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Violent Extremist Offenders in Bangladesh’ and interviewed scores of captive militants both faith-based and left extremism in prisons.

People with relatively poor financial backgrounds are more susceptible to faith-based extremism, he added.

Ahmed said the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had created a major impact in Bangladesh, with hundreds of militants who joined the Mujahideen during the anti-Soviet campaign against the invasion of Afghanistan following the calls from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States to resist communism in Afghanistan.

After the collapse of the Mujahideen-led regime in Kabul, most of the militants from Bangladesh returned home and started a violent campaign under HuJI-B (Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, Bangladesh) under the complicity of the government.

Fazlul Rahman, a Bangladeshi-born jihadist and founder of HuJI-B, joined by dreaded jihadist leaders from Pakistan, Egypt and the Middle East, were the five associates who signed Osama bin Laden’s first-international 1988 ‘fatwa’ purportedly was a call for jihad against the United States and its ‘infidel’ allies.

Ahmed explains the figure of the exact number of Bangladesh nationals who fought alongside the Mujahideen is unknown, but others put the figures at 3,000-foot soldiers.

Interestingly there is no information on whether militants from Bangladesh joined the Taliban during the two decades of America’s presence in Afghanistan, and the reason was absence of sponsors and recruitment.

The departure of flights to jihad’s hot spot destination and subsequently the return of hundreds of militants under the nose of the security agencies only happen with the state’s complicity of the Islamic-nationalist regime of Khaleda Zia, several counter-terrorism analysts described.

The recruitment, investment and radicalisation by outlawed Al Qaeda, Al-Qaeda in Indian Sub-continent (AQIS), Ansar al-Islam, Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), Hizb ut-Tahrir (Bangladesh), HuJI-B, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or Daesh), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and so on so forth are stringently monitored and data thoroughly analysed by CTTC expert team with inputs from other anti-terror units and friendly intel agencies, including the United Nations Office of Counter Terrorism (UNOCT).

The fresh recruitments in recent times are through end-to-end encrypted messaging apps organised by mostly “elite urban young men” who were reported missing by their families and are accommodated discretely in temporary sleeper cells operated by the jihadist network.

Often the sleeper cells are busted and the missing persons reported to the police are found. Instead of returning them to their families, they land in high-security prison cells.

At least 615 extremists within the age bracket of 25-40 are currently held in prisons, among whom 371 are on trial and 244 were convicted, according to a study on ‘Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Violent Extremist Offenders in Bangladesh’ published in September 2022 by Centre for Genocide Studies (CGS) of Dhaka in collaboration with CTTC.

The rehabilitation of violent extremist offenders VEO is a critical task for a nation-state, recommends Ahmed. The government has employed several hard and soft approaches to deal with the threat of violent extremism.

The police and other anti-crime forces have a deradicalization programme, as well as rehabilitation and reintegration into society. The authorities have plans to enlarge a proactive programme for the rehabilitation and reintegration of faith-based VEOs are on the table.

The recent sleeper cells of the terror network are reportedly low in budget and ordinance, unlike the high-profile ISIS jihadists responsible for the carnage at Holey Artisan restaurant in an upscale residential area in Dhaka in July 2016. The jihadists were armed to the teeth with automatic rifles, grenades and knives.

Possibly an hour before the fire-fight with the heavily armed military commandos, the Islamic State’s Amir for the Bengal [Bangladesh] region Shaykh Abu Ibrahim Al Hanif [aka Tamim Chowdhury], spoke to their clandestine news agency Amaq. He dubbed the dead militants as fallen martyrs – all young men in their 20s – posing with a terror black flag of the dreaded Islamic State.

In fact, two months before the brutal assault, Canadian-Bangladeshi-born Chowdhury, the mastermind of the ‘Dhaka Attack’ dared to bully Bangladesh and India in the 14th edition of the defunct Dabiq — the Islamic State’s online magazine.

“Bengal is an important region for the caliphate [Islamic Empire] and the global jihad due to its strategic geographic position,” Chowdhury ranted.

In typical terror rhetoric, “Bengal is located on the eastern side of India, whereas Wilāyat Khurāsān [the Afghanistan-Pakistan region] is located on its western side. Thus, having a strong jihad base in Bengal will facilitate performing guerrilla attacks inside India simultaneously from both sides and facilitate creating a condition of tawahhush [fear and chaos] in India along with the help of the existing local mujahideen there.”

The rogue Islamic State in 2015’s dared to declare Jihad (holy war) against “the [so-called] secular murtaddin [infidels] of the present Awami League government” and threatened that “the soldiers of the Khilafah will continue to rise and expand in Bengal and their actions will continue.”

Not to anybody’s surprise the official Dabiq magazine attributed the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) as ‘nationalist murtaddin’ and the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) as “parliamentary murtaddin”, the online magazine wrote that they [BNP and JeI] are an alliance of ‘grave-worshippers’ who falsely claim to be “lovers of the Prophet”.

On a note, ISIS laments that various “jihadi” groups in Bangladesh became fragmented through disputes over issues of creed, methodology, leadership, strategy, and tactics.

Fortunately, most of the sleeper cells of ISIS in Bangladesh and India have been bulldozed by anti-terror forces with credible two-way intel shared with Dhaka and New Delhi.

The intel immensely helped to accurately analyse various info and could zero in on the locations of ISIS militants. The targets were successfully raided by the CTTC, highly trained anti-terror units of Dhaka Metropolitan Police and smashed the jihadist outfit in Bangladesh.

Like the global terror outfit Al-Qaeda, ISIS’s covert activities have been severely dented in Bangladesh.

Simultaneously the jihadist’s sleeper cells in adjoining Indian states across Bangladesh territory were also smashed by Indian Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS).

Since the assassination of Islamic State supremo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and other leaders by US drone attacks in Syria and Iraq, ISIS terrorism has significantly scaled down threats in South Asia.

The in-road of terror footprint was globally established after the US-allied-led ‘War Against Terrorism’ and Afghanistan was invaded to punish Al-Qaeda and Taliban’s high command and crush the global terror network.

When they (Al-Qaeda) were on the run, Al-Qaeda’s communications and finance surreptitiously moved to Bangladesh in collaboration with the notorious Pakistan spy agency Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI).

The ISI hawks of Rawalpindi GHQ negotiated with rogue officers within the Bangladesh security agency of Director-General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) to provide logistics and security to Al-Qaeda to setup their clandestine operations from upscale Gulshan in Dhaka, according to researcher/writer Mohiuddin Ahmed in his book ‘Hunt for Al-Qaeda (Al Qaeda’r Khoje)’.

For example, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia knew about the covert operations and was vetted by his delinquent son Tarique Rahman who established ‘Hawa Bhaban’, a powerhouse parallel to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).

Several sources suggest the former security agencies officials who are privy to the process of creating a safe house for the most-wanted jihadists in the posh Gulshan area.

The terrorist hub was uncovered by an elite investigation team of British TV Channel-4 in November 2002. The investigative journalists unveil the ISI nexus with DGFI in providing a safehouse for Al-Qaeda on the campus of a mosque.

The revelation came with a heavy price. The Channel-4 journalists and local fixers (including this journalist) were arrested and sued under sedition laws. They were interrogated, tortured and intimidated by three DGFI officials.

The presence of Al-Qaeda in Bangladesh was exposed in a Time magazine October 2002 cover story “Deadly Cargo” after a painstaking investigation found clandestine military training camps bordering Bangladesh-Myanmar inaccessible hill forests of Ukhiya, in Cox’s Bazar and were operated by Al-Qaeda and coordinated by HuJI.

The camps accommodated nearly 2,500 jihadists. It is difficult to ascertain how many batches and what number of combatants were trained in Ukhiya.

The separatist outfits: United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), Bodo Liberation Tigers Force (BLTF) and Kamtapur Liberation Organization (KLO), National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) and the All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF) and the list grows on and on were provided shelter and logistics in Bangladesh territory.

Taking advantage of India’s pitch against illegal migration in the northeast from Bangladesh, the authorities furtively provided shelter to their leaders and allowed their combatants to set up camps inside Bangladesh territory.

Their finance, logistics and ordinance were exclusively provided by ISI. In one such, gunrunning operation destined for Assam, a huge stash (10 truckloads) of weapons, ammunition, rocket launchers and hand grenades were accidentally seized by police when it was unloaded under the cover of darkness at a jetty in Chittagong (now Chattagram) in April 2004.

The ordinance originated from Cambodia was shipped by ace gunrunners and unloaded at Chattagram. The ULFA military wing chief Paresh Baruah was physically present, while mid-level officers of DGFI and National Security Intelligence (NSI) were supervising the unloading of the illegal consignment from a large fishing vessel, as reported in the Bangladesh Observer.

After 2009, with Hasina in power, Dhaka and Delhi agreed to seize cross-border terrorism. Hasina’s crackdown detained most of the separatist leaders and deported them to India, where the belligerents are held as prisoners of war (POW). Scores of militant camps were dismantled.

Simultaneously, on the orders of Bangladesh [Central] Bank, all the bank accounts of the separatist outfits and their allied business conglomerates were shut down.

The sudden move by the authorities severely fractured the backbone of the separatist movement in northeast India, also known as Seven Sisters.

The nexus between Pakistan and Khaleda Zia was established after the former ISI chief General Asad Durrani admitted to meddling in northeast Indian states and funding the right-wing BNP during the 1991 general elections in that country.

The confession was made at Pakistan’s Supreme Court’s hearing on the spy agency that had allegedly disbursed Rs 50 crore to BNP chairperson and former prime minister Khaleda Zia ahead of the 1991 elections in which the BNP won and formed the government.

It is presumed that the ISI was active in Bangladesh whenever the BNP has been in power (1991-96) and later during 2001-2006.

Similarly, Khaleda’s assassinated husband General Ziaur Rahman provided umbrellas for Nagaland and Mizoram secessionist leaders and allowed guerrilla camps to be set up in Chattagram Hill Tracts (CHT) in the last quarter of the 1970s.

The shakeup in DGFI and other state intelligence agencies was initiated by Hasina after she became Prime Minister 14 years ago. She broke the nexus with foreign intelligence, especially ISI’s local patrons which have vanished in quicksand.

On the other hand, Bangladesh counter-terrorism officials dug into the covert activities of diplomats from Pakistan. The furore over expelling diplomats from Dhaka and Islamabad caused fresh diplomatic rows between the two countries.

Bangladesh expelled two diplomats, one woman envoy for alleged “terror financing” and another for “spying”, while Pakistan expelled a woman diplomat from Islamabad for an unknown reason.

A ‘new chapter’ for terror in Bangladesh seems to have surfaced in the Rohingya refugee camps teeming with dispossessed youths. The camps are another fertile ground for potential recruitments for extremism – some recruitments were voluntary, others were coercion and intimidation to join the banned Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA, also called Harakah al-Yaqin) to separate north Arakan for the homeland of the Rohingyas.

ARSA’s supremo and key leaders were born in Karachi, Pakistan and raised in Saudi Arabia – some Bangladesh security experts believe the shadows of the terror network were nurtured by ISI, which rang alarm bells in both Dhaka and New Delhi.

Pakistan-based terror outfits were looking for fresh ground for jihad. Immediately, the Pathankot attack mastermind Mohammad Masood Azhar, founder of Pakistan-based terrorist organisation JeM in September 2017 called on the world’s Muslims to unite for this cause of the persecuted Rohingya. “We have to do something and do it urgently. Myanmar’s soil is earnestly waiting for the thumping sound of the footsteps of the conquerors”.

“The dream [of Al-Qaeda] is to create a larger Islamic beyond the territorial limits of Bangladesh to include Muslim areas of Assam, north Bengal and Burma’s [Myanmar] Arakan province.” That dream, Alex Perry writes in Time magazine that if Islamic terrorists were allowed to continue their operations in Bangladesh, could be a nightmare for the region.

The HuJI-B, JeM, LeT and AQIS envisaged engaging the Myanmar troops and anti-Rohingya Buddhist monks through Islamic jihad to create a haven, which Bangladesh security forces are hell-bent on not happening in the region.

First published in the India Narrative, New Delhi, India on April 25, 2023

(Saleem Samad is an award-winning independent journalist based in Bangladesh. Views expressed are personal. Twitter: @saleemsamad)

As Kabul Burns, Need To Talk About Pakistan

Taliban fighters patrols the streets of Kabul

SALEEM SAMAD

It was certain that the suicide bombings at the Kabul airport during the crucial evacuation of tens of thousands of stranded foreign nationals and NATO troops, was an act of the Islamic State’s “Khorasan Province” (IS-KP), the branch of the organisation in Afghanistan and Pakistan that was officially recognised by Islamic State (ISIS) “Centre” in 2015.

The IS-KP was conspicuously quiet since the fall of Kabul, and it could be understood why.

The distinction between IS-KP and Taliban is well understood by several security experts. IS-KP is a non-state actor and the Taliban is an extension of deep state Pakistan. IS-KP is backed by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which also promised to establish Islamic Khilafat.

After 20 years, the Taliban re-entered Kabul. This time driving Humvees and riding tanks fluttering their white flag with signs “Shahada” in Arabic. The gun-trotting foot soldiers captured Afghanistan without a firefight, along with the Taliban were the Haqqani Network — is just the latest iteration of Pakistan’s jihad project in Afghanistan, since 1974.

Pakistan’s dreaded spy agency ISI has recruited, trained, armed, funded, and often led the Islamist militants in Afghanistan to create a colonial dependency because the ISI believes it is in a “civilizational” war with India.

Pakistan military hawks in Rawalpindi’s conspiracy theory insist that if India wins the heart of the Taliban for the completion of the mega infrastructure projects then India will “encircle” Pakistan.

Therefore, Rawalpindi hawks want to be the first to manipulate the controls of Afghanistan.

Twenty-five years ago, Rawalpindi began recruiting, training and arming the Pashtun tribesman to form the Taliban militia, with the knowledge of Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Major General Naseerullah Khan Babar, a retired officer of Pakistan Army and also the Interior Minister in Benazir’s cabinet admitted to a Pakistan journalist Hamid Mir of GEO TV that their government handed doles and weapons to many famous Afghan rebels like Ahmad Shah Masood, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in 1975 as boss of infamous border guards, the Frontier Corps on the directives of then Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, father of Benazir Bhutto.

Pakistan provided weapons and training to the Afghan Mujahideen in 1975 because the Afghan government led by Sardar Daud was allegedly sponsoring terrorism in Pakistan in collaboration with India.

Many know that Pakistan recruited ethnic Pashtuns from Quranic schools (Madrassahs) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and was known as Taliban.

Pakistan undertook responsibility on behalf of the Americans to provide protection and security of the multi-billion dollar Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline (TAPI) by American energy giant Unocal.

The Taliban was deployed as “pipeline police” and the Americans paid up the militia for guarding the pipeline.

Zalmay Khalilzad, who signed the Doha agreement with Mullah Baradar in 2020, arranged a visit of Taliban leaders to Unocal offices in the US in 1997.

According to Hamid Mir, many people say that the Taliban of today are different from the Taliban of 2001. “I think they are still loyal to their old ideology, but they have learned some new tactics in the last two decades.”

The political office of the Taliban working out of Qatar does not have independent decision-making authority. Decision-making powers lie with “Rahbri Shoora” or grand consultative council and most of its members were part of the resistance inside Afghanistan.

The Supreme Leader of the Taliban, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, is the ultimate authority on religious, political and military affairs. He makes decisions in consultation with his three deputies.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a founding member of the Taliban, looks after political affairs; Mullah Yaqoob, son of Mullah Omar, is head of military affairs and also looks after southern parts of Afghanistan. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the elder son of famous Afghan guerrilla commander Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, looks after eastern parts of Afghanistan. Yaqoob and Sirajuddin are responsible for appointing provincial and district governors.

Taliban’s after the fall of Kabul announced to form a consensus unitary government in Kabul. The Taliban are very much flexible on the inclusion of all ethnic minorities, women and even non-Muslims in a new government, but have strong reservations on “western democracy”.

Nevertheless, fighting a superpower was not difficult for them. One generation defeated the Soviet Union, and another generation defeated the Americans but running a country is quite difficult.

Indeed, the Taliban can’t afford isolation and that’s why they need to address the concerns of all those countries that fear that the territory of Afghanistan will be used for terrorist activities against them.

In the last two decades, the Taliban learned to handle diplomats and media. Now they need to learn public diplomacy and the best way to win public trust comes through the ballot, not through bullets.

First published in The News Times, 2 September 2, 2021

Saleem Samad, is an independent journalist, media rights defender, recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He could be reached at <saleemsamad@hotmail.com>; Twitter @saleemsamad

Proxy Warlord Who Undermines US Capabilities

SALEEM SAMAD

Qassim Soleimani, a shadowy Iranian general and head of rogue Quds Forces who has been blamed for exporting proxy war in the Middle East region had undermined the capability of the United States. Iran's clerics tasked the Quds Force with spreading Iran's influence abroad. In the past two decades, Suleimani had extraordinary success in implementing Tehran's objective in exporting proxy war in the region.

General Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force killed in a US drone strike at Baghdad airport on early on 3rd January, was the most influential military figures in Iran. Revered by Iranian as an iconic military commander and a blue-eyed boy of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was born in a peasant family in a small city in eastern Iran to become one of the most prominent military figures.

In the chaos and death that followed the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the 2011 Syrian revolution, Suleimani took the opportunity, pouring in men and money to build a crescent of pro-Iran forces stretching across the Middle-East. The iconic hero was the mastermind of proxy wars which extended from Gaza to Lebanon, from Iraq to Yemen. Literally, the proxy wars eclipsed Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Israel in the west and south. All the hated countries were staunch supporters of United States hegemony in the Middle East.

He successfully raised and trained tens of thousands of pro-Iran forces to destabilise the countries in regular battles for years to demoralise the regimes that Iran hated the most. No doubt his Quds Forces made decisive battles against ISIS or Daesh in Syria and Iraq, Al Qaeda and Taliban in the region, which was silently appreciated by the western powers including Pentagon.

There are not enough narratives about Soleimani's past, as he carefully avoided Iranian media. However, the 61-year-old father of five wasn't a religious scholar and didn't receive a religious education was an icon of Muslim fighters in the region.

In spite of his unknown reasons to participate in the demonstrations that toppled the Shah of Iran in 1979 in an Islamic Revolution orchestrated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but he did not hesitate to join the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and fought in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, where his future was made in solid ground.

His name was discussed in the Islamic clergy regime in Tehran after reconnaissance missions behind Iraqi lines during the war. He was given command of a special brigade during the war with Iraq. For commanding abilities and plan covert operations, he was entrusted to strengthen the Quds Force in 1998. The elite troop was raised during the Iran-Iraq war to provide military support to the Kurds in Iraq.

Soon Quds began to train foreign forces and equip them with weapons and also funded them to fight against regimes loyal to the US. The militia forces and warlords - Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen were overtly backed by Iran.

Quds was also responsible for training paramilitary forces in Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State (ISIS) Jihadists.

Last April, the United States in a bid to counter Iran-backed terrorism around the world listed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including the Quds Force a terrorist organisation. Earlier when the US invaded Afghanistan after the 1/11 terror attacks, Iranian officials - on Soleimani's orders - shared strategic maps with American officials of Taliban bases to target in Afghanistan.

Despite Quds involvement in attacks on US forces in Iraq after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Soleimani cooperated with the Americans to elect Iraq's interim prime minister in 2010. US Defence Department says at least 603 American personnel were killed in hostile actions in Iraq by Iran-backed fighters.

The US in defence of Americans abroad had to strike the Quds dreaded commander. As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US airstrike that killed Soleimani disrupted an "imminent attack" and "saved American lives" in the Middle East region. Despite Iran's vow to revenge against the US for killing Qassim Soleimani, it may compel Tehran to think twice before they attack the US or its partners in the region.

First published in The New Nation, Dhaka, Bangladesh on 6 January 2020

Saleem Samad, is an independent journalist, media rights defender, recipient of Ashoka Fellow (USA) and Hellman-Hammett Award. Email:

Black Friday: A year ago ISIS militants deadly seize

Photo: Smiling five militants posted in ISIS online

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

Bangladesh hide and seek on presence of Islamic State militants

SALEEM SAMAD

Bangladesh is embarrassed. So are the top officials of Interpol, security experts, academicians, police chiefs from the region attending the three-day long conference organized by Bangladesh Police and the Interpol in the capital.

Bangladesh Police top brass AKM Shahidul Hoque has denied the presence of Jihadist of Islamic State (IS or ISIS) in the country. "There is no presence of the Islamist terrorist outfit here," the inspector general of police maintained at impromptu press briefing on Monday morning.

"These are baseless propaganda. What we call militants are actually 'homegrown' who might have been embodied with IS philosophy and ideology. But they don't have any link with the IS," said Hoque. His reaction came in the wake of Prof Rohan Gunaratna, an international security expert, who affirmed on the presence of IS jihadist in Bangladesh and that the outfit carried out the Gulshan café attack on July 1.

What further embarrassed the government was the joint forces operation to disengage and neutralize the militants, release the hostages and regain control of the café, when his paper,  "Deradicalization of Militant: An Approach for Disengagement and Reintegration into Society,"

Government was enraged not only with his observation on presence of IS in Bangladesh, the military brass took the scholar's comments on delayed commando operation to regain the seized café, as an exception and interference into internal affairs.

Gunaratna said police should have immediately responded to the café attack and should not have lingered on for the commandos to join the operation. The conference seeks to build regional cooperation in curbing violent extremism and transnational crime.

In a typical IS  strategy, Gunaratna explained that the IS second phase was propaganda and the third phase was showdown. "The group that mounted the Holey Artisan attack is not the JMB. In fact, it is the IS," opined the expert.

But unfortunately, the Bangladeshi political leadership did not accept that the group that is operating is the IS, Gunaratna remarked.

Administration top officials, including Home Affairs Minister Asaduzzaman Khan and the inspector general of police have repeatedly said that there is no presence of ISIS in Bangladesh. Prime Minster Sheikh Hasina described any such claims as local and foreign conspiracies.

There could be various reasons why the government is determined to justify non-existence of jihadist or Islamic militants who are linked to Al Qaeda or Islamic State. Head of Singapore based International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research Rohan Gunaratna, has claimed that terrorist network Islamic State has physical presence in Bangladesh.

Police chief Shahidul Hoque described Gunaratna as an academician, a professor of a university. In a virulent attack, Hoque observed that "he does not deal with any security issue. He has done his academic research on his own. But he does not have experience of the real issue of Bangladesh."

"What Mr Rohan said is his own statement. We don't endorse his statement," the IGP concluded. Born in Sri Lanka, Gunaratna interviewed terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia and other conflict zones, according to his brief biography presented at the conference.

The United States 9/11 Commission formed after the attack of Twin-Tower in New York invited Gunaratna to testify on the structure of al-Qaeda.

Gunaratna, who teaches security studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, is also a trainer for national security agencies, law enforcement authorities and military counter-terrorism units, said his bio distributed at the conference.

This article first appeared in The Asian Age, March 14, 2017

Saleem Samad, is an Ashoka Fellow (USA), an award winning investigative journalist and writes on current affairs