Military institute student to son of ex-judge, Islamic State taps Dhaka gen-next

Praveen Swami
April 16, 2015 
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He was just the kind of son that parents across the sub-continent are known to pray for. Soft-spoken and hard-working, Ashiqur Rahman had chalked up a stellar record as an engineering student at the elite Military Institute of Science and Technology in Dhaka — even his spare time was spent in studying Arabic.

Early this year, Rahman was selected for a conference in Istanbul. Then, one day in February, he disappeared.Rahman’s shattered parents came to know later from the Directorate-General of FieldIntelligence, Bangladesh’s military intelligence service, that there had been no conference: their son was somewhere inside the stretch of land in Iraq and Syria controlled by Islamic State.

“The government won a war against terrorists radicalised by the jihad in Afghanistan. Now, we are facing a second-generation terrorist, smarter and better educated than the first,” said Monirul Islam, Joint Commissioner with the Dhaka Metropolitan Police. Islam was referring to the ruthless — and successful — battle waged by Sheikh Hasina’sgovernment less than a decade ago against jihadist networks such as the Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami Bangladesh (HuJI-B) and the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). 

Shadow from the West

Investigations into the case of Samiun Rahman, a Bangladesh-origin British national held in September 2014, suggest the country’s diaspora in the West may be playing a key role in recruitment. The flood of recruits from the Bangladeshi diaspora in the United Kingdom is a particular source of concern, police said. Four men from Portsmouth alone have so far died in combat — Mehdi Hassan, 19, Mananur Roshid, 23, Ifthekar Jaman, 21, and Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, 24.

The scholar Ali Riaz recorded: “Beginning in 1984, a ‘volunteer corps’ was organised to join the jihad. Some 3,000 people under the leadership of Abdur Rahman Faruki were motivated to travel in several batches to Afghanistan and fight alongside other volunteer mujahideen.”

In an online eulogy, Faruki’s commander, Maulana Pir Mohammad Rehmani, recalls how the jihadist insisted on marching towards his death in a high-risk mission, saying he had come to Afghanistan “in search of martyrdom”.

Following the Taliban’s triumph in 1992, the veterans returned home, determined to use their experience as a template to create an Islamic State in Bangladesh. If history is repeating itself, Bangladesh could find itself at war with the rising Caliphate.