For Bangladesh, Denying Islamic State’s Presence Will Not Help

Increasing Islamisation of Bangladesh and IS presence there will pose challenges for India, writes C Uday Bhaskar.

Arrest of ISIS members in Singapore is a wake up call for Bangladesh, a country fraught with the challenge of radical fundamentalism. (Photo: Lijumol Joseph/ The Quint)

(Eight to ten armed terrorists attacked a bakery in the diplomatic zone of Dhaka, Bangladesh on Friday night. The wave of violence in the country over the past months has killed rationalists, bloggers, activists, and members of minorities. This article has been republished in light of the attack.)

The Singapore home ministry announced on May 3 that it had arrested eight Bangladeshi construction and marine industry workers on suspicion of being part of an Islamic State (IS) affiliate in their home country. According to the evidence collected from the suspects, it is reported that they had plans to “overthrow the democratically elected government through the use of force, establish an Islamic state in Bangladesh and bring it under IS’ self-declared caliphate.”

This is the second such arrest in Singapore and it may be recalled that in late 2015 a group of 26 Bangladeshi workers were arrested and deported for engaging in jihad-related activities. This was the first such arrest of foreign workers in the island-state and investigations revealed that the men were part of a secret religious Islamic group that supported the ideology of the al Qaeda and the IS.

It is understood that the group had been meeting secretly since 2013 in Singapore and planning attacks back home. It is instructive that it took almost two years plus for the security agencies to identify and apprehend the IS sympathisers and deport them back to Bangladesh. Construction workers are housed in spartan camps and far removed from their families and any other social contact. Consequently, they have been seen as fertile sites for silent radicalisation and the Bangladeshi worker has emerged as someone more susceptible to such indoctrination.

Eight Bangladeshi workers suspected to have links with the IS. (Source: Ministry of Home Affairs, Singapore)

Bangladesh’s Vulnerabilities

Is the IS a serious threat to Bangladesh and by extension to the South Asian region? While the Islamic State and its current leadership is on the defensive in Iraq and Syria since its dramatic rise over the last two years – the ideology it is identified with has attracted many adherents in many parts of the world. The Paris-Brussels attacks claimed by the IS constituency in Europe are illustrative.

Bangladesh is a distinctive socio-political eco-system in South Asia and the nation was born in 1971 from the womb of a bloody, genocidal conflict that pitted religion (Islam) against ethno-linguistic (Bangla) nationalism. The latter prevailed.

However, Bangladesh’s politics has acquired a binary contour that pits the two main political parties against each other over their respective interpretation of the practice of Islam. The current leadership of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has determinedly sought to bring the perpetrators of the 1971 genocide and their right-wing support base to justice while the opposition BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party) has left no stone unturned in resorting to political opportunism by stoking religious sentiments.

Bangladesh’s Radicalisation

• Arrest of eight Bangladeshi ISIS members in Singapore is second such arrest after a similar incident involving 26 Bangladeshi workers was reported in 2015.
  
• ISIS’ presence in Bangladesh comes at a time when the country witnesses those accused of 1971 war crime being hanged and the opposition trying to stoke religious sentiment.
  
• Recruitment drive in Bangladesh acknowledged by the IS magazine, that boasts of hiring Jamaat-e-Islami members.
  
• Presence of jihadi sleeper cells in Bangladesh poses a challenge for India and its counter-terrorism operations.
  

Bangladeshi teachers, students and social activists hold banners and sing songs during a protest against the killing of Professor Rezaul Karim Siddique in Dhaka, Bangladesh, 29 April 2016. (Photo: AP)

Islamic State Makes Inroads

The relatively moderate and tolerant practice of Islam that liberal Bangladeshis support is under attack and the last two years have seen a series of killings and pre-meditated violence that targeted bloggers, free-thinkers, gays, minorities -- some foreigners and those who opposed or questioned the extreme Wahabi/Salafi version of Sunni Islam.

While many of these attacks have been claimed by the IS, or its affiliates in Bangladesh, the government denies their presence and blames its political opponents. This assertion of the Hasina government is in contrast to the claim made by Abu Ibrahim al-Hanif the self-styled leader of the IS in Bangladesh.

The IS has a fairly well-oiled propaganda and recruitment machinery that uses modern communication outlets deftly.

In the April issue of Dabiq, a propaganda magazine, Abu Ibrahim claimed that many members of the Jamaat-e-Islami who opposed the creation of an independent Bangladesh are now joining the ranks of the IS.

Their opposition to the politics and policies of the Hasina government has been made public and the fact that the opposition BNP empathises with this orientation gives the Bangladeshi socio-political side its distinctive character that enables the nurturing of IS cells in distant locales like Singapore.

Challenge for India

The self-styled IS constituency in Bangladesh has threatened to use that country as a launching pad to target India and other neighbouring countries. The presence of jihadi sleeper cells in the neighbourhood is an abiding challenge for the Indian agencies, and counter-terrorism operations that can quietly and successfully prevent and preempt any attack are based on patiently linking disparate dots.

Singapore is one such flickering dot and the need for reviewing and improving regional counter-terror information and intelligence sharing is imperative. If Singapore with its much smaller demography and more technologically capable security agencies took two years to zero in on one such group of IS sympathisers – albeit foreign nationals -- the challenge for Bangladesh will be that much greater.

(The writer is a leading expert on strategic affairs. He is currently Director, Society for Policy Studies.)

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