MLM: "Fugitive Bangladeshi Ideologue Tamim al-Adnani Spearheading Virtual Jihadist Campaign"

In August 2013, a Bangladeshi court in Barguna district jailed several members of the extremist outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), including its spiritual leader Mufti Jasimuddin Rahmani, for subversive activities in the country. These ABT members were accused of widespread violence and targeted killings during the Shahabag protest movement held earlier that year. The incarceration of Rahmani brought his fellow cleric Tamim al-Adnani to the forefront of the terrorist group as its spiritual head. In 2013-2014, the ABT was a relatively new grouping whose activities were not widely known. Tamim al-Adnani rose to prominence as a firebrand ideologue and preacher, and subsequently became more notorious than Rahmani. He came to be known for his vitriolic criticism against Bangladeshi and Western governments, and for his exhortations for violence and jihad.

The subsequent investigations into ABT’s inner circle revealed that the group was modelled on the lines of al-Qaeda and that it existed with the blessings of ideologues like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Anwar al-Awlaki (Dhaka Tribune, May 25, 2015). The ABT, which eventually morphed into Ansar al-Islam-Bangladesh, has been operating based upon al-Zawahiri’s call for a popular uprising (intifada) against the Bangladeshi government, and has worked to support ‘scholars of Islam. It has become the official branch of al-Qaeda’s South Asian chapter, al-Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) (Dhaka Tribune, March 5, 2017). Between 2013 and 2016, ABT, aka Ansar al-Islam, began carrying out machete attacks, killing 12 mostly secular or progressive scholars, writers, and LGBT activists. According to Bangladeshi police, Tamim al-Adnani and Rezwanul Azad Rana, the chief architects of these targeted attacks, fled Bangladesh perhaps at different times following the countrywide crackdown against the Ansarullah militant network. While Rana fled to Malaysia in February 2014, the exact time and other details of al Adnani’s escape to Malaysia was not known (Daily Star, February 24, 2017).

For Full Text, See Militant Leadership Monitor, February 2020.