Sheikh Hasina Wazed, Awami League (AL) chief and Bangladesh’s incumbent prime minister, has long sold herself as a regional bulwark against Islamic extremism. Critics even accuse Wazed of scaremongering the general public to pry votes away from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led by her political nemesis, Khaleda Zia. And yet on her watch, Bangladesh has emerged this year as South Asia’s most vibrant jihadist factory. Some commentators suggest Wazed’s missionary zeal in prosecuting Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) patriarchs for “war crimes” is fuelling the jihadist problem by tipping incensed JI partisans towards radicalism to embarrass her government, if not topple it. On September 5, Mir Quasem Ali became the fifth party leader to be executed by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal.
Moreover, despite US Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent assertion that self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) militants in Bangladesh had verifiable links to Syria and Iraq, Dhaka’s stock response to incidents of domestic terrorism has been to outright rubbish these foreign ties. Episodes of violence bearing the mark of foreign jihadist cults have either been swept aside by the AL government or quickly blamed on the BNP, the country’s main opposition group, and its hard-right ally, the JI. Behind the long-running political theatre of the “battling begums” — the local media’s sobriquet for Wazed and Zia — global terrorist organisations, namely IS and al-Qaeda, have quietly set up shop.
Since 2013, the AL government has refused to accept that seemingly random attacks on minorities, freethinkers and foreigners by machete-wielding assailants or drive-by shooters that have left more than 40 dead were the handiwork of IS or al-Qaeda affiliates in Bangladesh. Instead, it pinned them on homegrown militant groups, backed by the BNP and JI of course, particularly the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). These militants, law enforcement officials stressed, were weaving illusory and opportunistic links to Iraq and Syria. In short, IS nor al-Qaeda had an operational foothold in the country. This facade perpetuated by Wazed herself crumbled with the Gulshan and Sholakia attacks in July.
Multiple armed attackers struck the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka’s upmarket Gulshan neighborhood on July 1, killing 20 patrons including 17 foreigners. IS immediately claimed responsibility for the hit through its social media outlets, and made public the photos of five attackers posing in the now familiar set piece: brandishing AK-47s before the group’s black flag. Dhaka police divulged that at least three attackers belonged to well-off families and had attended elite schools.
A week later, unknown militants threw homemade bombs and opened fire on a mammoth Eid congregation in the Sholakia field in Kishoreganj district of Dhaka, leaving four casualties. Law enforcement’s first instinct was to again deny any foreign connection to the attack.
That connection soon emerged in dramatic fashion. Under the gun to make headway, Dhaka police on a tip-off raided quarters in the city’s Kalyanpur area on July 26 and uncovered a jihadist safe house. They were met with resistance on location and killed nine militants in the ensuing crossfire. A militant taken alive insisted he was “IS” and that his cell had been plotting another major hit on the city. He also revealed the cell’s kingpin — and mastermind of the Gulshan and Sholakia attacks — to be a Canadian-Bengali man in his early 30s named Tamim Chowdhury.
Thought to head the JMB faction allied to IS, Chowdhury, using the alias Abu Ibrahim al-Hanif, was interviewed by the Middle Eastern group’s Al-Dabiq magazine not long ago where he promised bloody revolutions in Bangladesh and India. The magazine introduced him as IS’ Bangladesh chief. Chowdhury was killed alongside two cohorts in a firefight with local police in late August. More alarmingly, a list of 10 high-priority suspects released by a law enforcement agency recently shows he was merely one of at least three active IS recruiters in Bangladesh. The other two share his affluent background. Saifullah Ojaki teaches business administration at a university in Japan while Tajuddin Kausar has lived in Australia for over a decade.
Dr Sajjan Gohel, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, contends the Wazed government’s head-in-the-sand response to IS in Bangladesh is driven primarily by economic realism. “The government doesn’t want to say it has a terrorism problem, because that could hurt investment and trade with other countries,” he explains. Bangladesh’s garment industry accounts for 80 percent of its export revenue and some 15 percent of annual GDP. Historically reliant on foreign executives flying into the country to place orders, a sustained tempo of violence — jihadist or otherwise — could spell catastrophe for balance of trade.
Furthermore, foreign remittances that make up nine percent of the GDP today could be under threat if frequent terrorist attacks motivated by Islamic extremism tarnish Bangladesh’s cherished secular image. Should Western countries peg it as a new breeding ground for jihadism, freedom of travel for its citizens could be curtailed. This will compound employment woes at a time when plummeting oil prices have resulted in massive layoffs in the Arab kingdoms, home to 85 percent of Bangladesh’s expat population. If the deteriorating security situation in Bangladesh continues to coincide with rising xenophobia in western capitals, Bangladeshi Muslims could soon find it impossible to score jobs in the first world.
Meanwhile, the blame mongering continues unabated. Wazed, in a session of parliament in July, refused to join hands with the BNP in tackling militancy, saying she refused to work with “terrorists.” Wazed also insinuated that BNP demands for her resignation in the wake of the attacks held a darker meaning: “It is naturally visible in the BNP leaders’ comments that they are giving a condition — do this or else terrorism and militancy will not stop.” Keeping with the party line, Information Minister Hasan-ul-Haq Inu in mid-June had confided to reporters that Zia and the BNP were directing the terrorists. “The producer is BNP, the director is JI, and the small actors on the ground are variants of… militant Islamic networks.”
Though the government launched a nationwide crackdown following the murder of a police officer’s wife in June — eventually booking over 11,000 individuals including 150 suspected militants — the BNP cried foul, alleging the raids were calculated to detain its workers and leaders. Zia has reason to fear mass detentions. Bangladesh’s police has a dubious reputation for mysterious deaths occurring in custody, and staging extrajudicial murders popularly known as “crossfire killings.” Wazed, nonetheless, needs to realise that Bangladesh would struggle to bottle up the militancy genie without political consensus in parliament. Politicising terrorism at this crucial juncture smacks of very poor judgement.
The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance journalist