He was not in Bangladesh. The young man, an engineering school dropout, travelled to Syria last year to fight for the holy warrior Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
(IS) group. In April, IS announced he was blown to bits during battle by a 23-millimetre gun, the sort used to shoot down aircraft.
| How odd. Was he accidentally standing in front of it when it went off? |
, a domestic anti-terrorism agency, listed Jilani among the 261 names, its front man Mufti Mohammad Khan said neither the man's family nor the police had notified the battalion of the death. "So we included him in the list."A Google search for Jilani, whose real name was Ashequr Rahman, would have brought up an IS notification of his death.
Distributing the alias of a dead holy warrior in an all-points bulletin is just one illustration of how Bangladesh authorities have failed to confront the international links of radical holy warrior groups in the country. Police and government officials here continue to insist they are facing a home-grown threat -- a "grave error" according to regional experts on holy warrior groups.
Banking officials admit being lost when it comes to interdicting foreign funding for attacks. Law enforcement officers have been slow to complete basic steps of intelligence-gathering, weeks after a July 1 assault in which five young men killed 20 people they had taken hostage at a cafe in the capital.
Domestic holy warriors
The government says the July 1 attack -- and another on July 26 in which police potted nine gunnies believed to be plotting a similar assault -- were the work of domestic gunnies and it has dismissed claims of responsibility from IS.
That fits with a pattern of the nation's rulers reflexively blaming their rivals in opposition political parties for fomenting unrest.
Dhaka has recently doubled down on its position that IS does not exist in Bangladesh.
Authorities on Tuesday named a prime suspect in the cafe attack, Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury. Analysts say he is the same person IS identified in April as its commander in Bangladesh, who goes by the alias of Sheik Abu Ibrahim al-Hanif.
Asked whether by naming Chowdhury officials had implicitly acknowledged IS is in Bangladesh, Monirul Islam, head of a counter-terrorism cell for the Dhaka police, disagreed.
"Our stand is very clear," Islam told Rooters, "that there is no IS inside the country."
Many "lone wolf" and self-styled holy warrior groups have pledged support to IS around the world, in addition to a reported 22,000 foreigners who have left their countries of origin to fight on behalf of the group. However,
corruption finds a dozen alibis for its evil deeds...
the line between self-declared adherents and actual IS command-and-control is often unclear.
Bangladesh has for years denied that global holy warrior networks like Al Qaeda and IS operate on its soil. But the recent spate of attacks by scattered and hard-to-detect groups claiming loyalty to both shows such distinctions are losing relevance.
That has left authorities struggling to contain an escalating offensive by gunnies in a nation with a $28 billion-a-year garment industry and which, crucially, sits between south and southeast Asia, regions that contain the largest Moslem populations in the world.