"The Islamic State in Bangladesh", Terrorism Monitor
Spreading Tentacles: The Islamic State in Bangladesh
Animesh Roul
Spreading Tentacles: The Islamic State in Bangladesh
Animesh Roul
In an interview with Newsroom Post, Animesh Roul, Executive Director, Society for Study of Peace and Conflict, says that Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, Bangladesh (JMB) has flourished with the help of local support. Speaking to Newsroompost.com, Roul says that unchecked influx of Bangladeshi Muslims created pockets of influence for political parties in West Bengal.
Newsroom Post: What is your perception of the Burdwan incident?
Key points
Bangladesh faces growing security threats from a range of radical Islamist interests, including entrenched Deobandi militants, newly emergent jihadist groups, and even transnational operations such as Al-Qaeda.
A message from Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in January 2014, the first specifically directed at Bangladesh, will resonate with a number of radical groups aiming to spread jihad within the country.
Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) is a transnational Islamic religious-political organization which has presence over 20 countries across the world. HT was founded in Jerusalem in 1953 by Tokiuddin Al Nakhani. HT believes in Ummatic concept. Its website openly declares that: "It aims to revive the Islamic Ummah from the severe decline that it had reached, and to liberate it from the thoughts, systems and laws of Kufr, as well as the domination and influence of the Kufr states.
The political crisis in Bangladesh had deepened further with the BNP-led 18-party opposition alliance’s call for “March for Democracy” rally on December 29. More than seven hundred opposition party supporters were detained and many more were arrested at different entry points to Dhaka since December 26. One person died during a clash between opposition party activists and security forces in Dhaka on December 29.
Bangladesh, the world’s fourth largest Muslim country, has recently experienced an intense cycle of massive protest rallies marked by violent confrontations between moderate secularists and Islamic radical forces. The spark for these religious and political confrontations has been the ongoing trials for war-crimes committed by Islamist groups during and just after 1971’s Operation Searchlight, the Pakistani campaign that preceded the Bangladesh Liberation War.
The fortitude of cooperation and practical attitude in the investigation of transnational terrorist crimes is indispensable. Indian investigating agencies have been undergoing with many problems in trail of the terrorist related cases in investigations and checks in other countries. Consequently, cooperation between law enforcing authorities of different countries is a vital tool for fighting threats to security. It requires sustained cross border cooperation, coherent regional cooperation and specific global cooperation.
According to Thomas Homer-Dixon, water will be the major source of conflict in the upcoming time. The contemporary scenario represents somewhat the same picture. Present era is marked with various kinds of conflicts where resource sharing between the nations is a big issue of contemplation, which further leads to disagreement. The conflict often arises due to unequal distribution of resources or from a dependency-led need for more resources often at the expense of neighboring states.
six years after the audacious terrorist attacks of 2005, Bangladesh’s elite counterterrorism agency, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), claims to have neutralized JMB’s core and substantially reduced the risk it poses. Yet the JMB threat to Bangladesh has not been eliminated. While the group has been dramatically weakened, there are new concerns that it is attempting to reconstitute itself.This article assesses JMB’s current strength, which is based on interrogations from recently arrested operatives.
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