There is nothing more exciting to terrorists than somebody else doing their job. Terror is what they specialise in, and there is an innate tendency among terrorist groups to claim responsibility for bombings and attacks perpetrated by others. The claim of the Islamic State that they carried out the attack in Dhaka must be seen in this light. The government of Bangladesh has said that the attack has no links to IS and was carried out by homegrown terrorists and the government version looks more plausible considering that the country’s intelligence services have been able to identify the terrorists and glean crucial information about them. But this also points to another painful fact – that homegrown terrorists were able to carry out an attack of the scale and brutality associated with global jihadists and the intelligence services failed to thwart them or at least issue warnings even though all the seven gunmen were locals and five were on a government militant watchlist. The militants killed 20 hostages, most of them foreigners, at the Holey Artisan Bakery in central Dhaka.
While Bangladeshis are yet to recover from the shock, the attack has also exposed a new, puzzling phenomenon – that the jehadists were well-educated people and hailed from wealthy families. Some of the men went to an elite public school in Dhaka, Scholastic, and then college at North South University in the capital and Monash University in Malaysia. What inspired them to take up jihad and chop people with machetes is not known. When asked about it, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said: “It has become a fashion.” It could be fashion, but there is a macabre madness to this fashion which the government must take seriously.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has promised to eradicate extremism from Bangladeshi soil and she is likely to win broad public support in this task because Bangladesh is a secular, peaceful country where people of different religions live in harmony. But this is an enormous challenge which the government cannot undertake alone, but only collectively with support from all sections of people. The government must enlist the support of all political parties, religious groups and non-governmental organisations and a massive campaign must be launched to help people to be on guard to identify extremists and inform the authorities. Bangladesh is already reeling from the consequences of the attack. The $26bn garment industry, which provides livelihood for millions of workers in a poor nation, is extremely worried. Foreign countries have issued travel warnings and will want better security for their citizens.
There is nothing more exciting to terrorists than somebody else doing their job. Terror is what they specialise in, and there is an innate tendency among terrorist groups to claim responsibility for bombings and attacks perpetrated by others. The claim of the Islamic State that they carried out the attack in Dhaka must be seen in this light. The government of Bangladesh has said that the attack has no links to IS and was carried out by homegrown terrorists and the government version looks more plausible considering that the country’s intelligence services have been able to identify the terrorists and glean crucial information about them. But this also points to another painful fact – that homegrown terrorists were able to carry out an attack of the scale and brutality associated with global jihadists and the intelligence services failed to thwart them or at least issue warnings even though all the seven gunmen were locals and five were on a government militant watchlist. The militants killed 20 hostages, most of them foreigners, at the Holey Artisan Bakery in central Dhaka.
While Bangladeshis are yet to recover from the shock, the attack has also exposed a new, puzzling phenomenon – that the jehadists were well-educated people and hailed from wealthy families. Some of the men went to an elite public school in Dhaka, Scholastic, and then college at North South University in the capital and Monash University in Malaysia. What inspired them to take up jihad and chop people with machetes is not known. When asked about it, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said: “It has become a fashion.” It could be fashion, but there is a macabre madness to this fashion which the government must take seriously.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has promised to eradicate extremism from Bangladeshi soil and she is likely to win broad public support in this task because Bangladesh is a secular, peaceful country where people of different religions live in harmony. But this is an enormous challenge which the government cannot undertake alone, but only collectively with support from all sections of people. The government must enlist the support of all political parties, religious groups and non-governmental organisations and a massive campaign must be launched to help people to be on guard to identify extremists and inform the authorities. Bangladesh is already reeling from the consequences of the attack. The $26bn garment industry, which provides livelihood for millions of workers in a poor nation, is extremely worried. Foreign countries have issued travel warnings and will want better security for their citizens.
