Jihad Comes Close To Home

The news from Bangladesh should alert India to the threat from ISIS. It is real and immediate.

- Tufail Ahmad

Operatives Of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are gaining ground on three  flanks of India. On the eastern side, its activities are mainly in Bangladesh and Assam. It also has influence in more than a dozen states within the country. On the west, Pakistan, as expected, is sheltering the dreaded outfit.

In particular, Bangladesh is seeing jihadist trouble increase. This year alone, four secular bloggers, both Hindu and Muslim, were killed: Niloy Chatterjee on 6 August in Dhaka, Ananta Bijoy Das on 12 May in Sylhet, Washiqur Rahman Babu in Dhaka on 30 March, and Avijit Roy in Dhaka on 26 February. Their killings have been claimed by Ansarullah Bangla Team (ATB). The first high-profile killing was of Ahmed Rajib Haider on 15 February 2013 in Dhaka. It seems it was carried out by an offshoot of the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, which later evolved into ATB after establishing a relationship with Al-Qaeda. At least one terror training camp of Bangladeshi nationals in Afghanistan was noticed in the recent past. There were attempts on the lives of other bloggers. While blogs written by Ahmed Rajib Haider and other secular bloggers led to the Shahbag protests in February 2013 demanding capital punishment for the Jamaat-e-Islami leaders convicted of war crimes in the 1971 war, counterprotests were led by Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh and other Islamist groups such as Hefajat-e-Islam (‘Protection of Islam’), leading to nearly 50 deaths in May 2013. Islamists groups can organise quickly. Hefajat-e-Islam, a coalition of a dozen Islamist groups supported by 25,000 madrassas in Bangladesh, did not exist before 2010. Its rise, the conviction of Jamaat-e-Islami leaders for war crimes and Al-Qaeda’s designs on the region came after that.