Bangladesh faces renewed extremist threats amid growing security concerns
Dhaka, Aug 22 (IANS) Bangladesh’s response to militancy in the two years since the ouster of the former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August 2024 has been marked by confusion, swinging between denial and exaggerated reactions. While the country’s Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed publicly claimed that militancy “no longer exists in the country,” Bangladeshi police in recent months have flagged a surge in militant activities nationwide, a report has stated.
Last week, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) warned that Al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) has been attempting to use Bangladesh as a base to establish terrorist cells.
The finding appeared in the 38th report of the UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team. The report was submitted to the Security Council committee dealing with Islamic State, Al-Qaida and associated groups.
“Although the UN report mentioned Bangladesh in only one sentence, it triggered enormous and somewhat surprising media coverage in Bangladesh, with several news publications drawing attention to Muslim radicalism in the country. Police also swung into action. They instructed field-level police to ‘remain on high alert’,” a report in ‘The Diplomat’ mentioned.
Highlighting growing concerns over the rise in extremist activities across Bangladesh, the report said that in June 2026, authorities issued a terror alert warning of a possible attack on police headquarters. Citing media reports from last year, it revealed that Bangladeshi nationals allegedly joined the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). It added that on August 12 this year, police recovered a homemade pressure-cooker bomb from Dhaka’s Savar area.
According to the report, terror AQIS’s post-2024 strategy was most clearly articulated by its leader Ustadh Usama Mahmood in a statement issued through As-Sahab Media and addressed to Bangladesh’s “religious community” following Hasina’s ouster in August 2024.
He underlined what amounts to a four-part strategy: “embrace da’wah (mass preaching) as the primary vehicle; build ‘capability for resistance and revolution’; use that capability to pressure the state into reform from outside; and, pointedly, avoid entering government altogether,”
“The document frames electoral or bureaucratic participation as a trap that has historically neutered Islamist movements from Cairo to Islamabad, and argues instead for a long, patient movement-building strategy, deepening roots in the population rather than contesting power directly,” The Diplomat mentioned.
The report noted that from 2013 to 2016, AQIS-linked operatives in Bangladesh established a notoriety for attacking atheist bloggers, secular publishers and academics. Writers Avijit Roy and Faisal Arefin Deepan were among those killed over their writings, which the terror group deemed offensive to Islam.
“Amid AQIS’s renewed confidence in post-2024 Bangladesh, the risk is that critics of religious orthodoxy, and minority rights advocates could once again face intimidation — even if the country does not see a return to mass‑casualty attacks,” the report stated.
Despite a $5 million reward still being offered by the US State Department for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Bangladeshi terror fugitive and dismissed army officer Syed Ziaul Haque – a convicted conspirator in the 2015 killing of American citizen Avijit Roy – influential retired military officers in Bangladesh are working to suspend his convictions, drop his pending criminal cases and ultimately pave the way for his return to military service, a report revealed earlier this week.
“If successful, the campaign would raise uncomfortable questions about Bangladesh’s commitment to counterterrorism cooperation with Washington and about the future of one of America’s most prominent terrorism cases in South Asia,” Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, Editor of Bangladeshi newspaper ‘Blitz’, wrote in ‘The Jerusalem Post’.
–IANS
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