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Murders in Bangladesh, Government Looks the Other Way

by Monir Hussain
May 20, 2015 at 4:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5787/bangladesh-bloggers-murders

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Comment

• Forty-seven percent of Bangladeshi Muslims said that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets could be justified to defend Islam from an enemy (compared to Malaysia at 18%, Indonesia at 9% and Pakistan at 3%).
• It seems clear, therefore, why the dissidents, atheists and secularists in Bangladesh remain unassisted by the society and the government.

A third brilliant blogger has been hacked to death in Bangladesh since February. On May 9,Ananta Bijoy Das, a banker by profession, and a blogger, was murdered, apparently by Islamist extremists.
Das was murdered in broad daylight on a busy street in the country's fifth largest city, Sylhet. He had written for Mukto-Mona (Free Mind), a website with which the Bangladeshi-American blogger, Abhijit Roy, had worked before being hacked to death himself in February by machete-wielding assailants.
Five weeks after Roy's death, yet another blogger, Oyasiqur Rahman, was also brutally murdered by three men in Dhaka.
Their deaths echoed the murder of Ahmed Rajib Haider on February 15, 2013, and the stabbing in Bangladesh of Asif Mahiuddin in January 2013.
Ansarullah Bangla Team, one of the Islamist groups operating in Bangladesh, claimed all three killings of recent months. The group, also known as Ansar Bangla 8, tweeted within hours of Das's murder: "Alhamdulillah [Arabic for 'praise God'], all the brothers of Operation team are safe." An hour later, the group said that Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) claimed responsibility for killing Das. Detectives suspect that the Ansarullah Bangla team maintains contact with Al-Qaeda.
Recently, the leader of AQIS, Asim Umar, also claimed responsibility for the murder of six people, who according to him, were blasphemers. One included Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American science writer.
In addition to Roy, AQIS heralded its Jihadists as responsible for killing:

• Ahmed Rajib Haider (Bangladeshi blogger)
• Shafiul Islam (a university professor killed in September 2014)
• Oyasiqur Rahman (Bangladeshi blogger)
• Muhammad Shakil Auj (Dean of Islamic studies at Karachi University in Pakistan)
• Aniqa Naz (Pakistani blogger)

"Praise be to Allah," Umar said. "These assassinations are part of a series of operations initiated by the different branches of Al Qaeda on the orders of our respected leader, Sheikh Ayman Al Zawahiri (may Allah protect him). It is equally part of our commitment to fulfill the oath Sheikh Osama [bin Laden] (may Allah have mercy on him)."
BBC reported that "[a]ll these killings were carried out in near identical fashion. ... This pattern has convinced observers that the killers, even if they are from different parts of the country, as being advised or trained by one group."

Ananta Bijoy Das (left) was hacked to death on May 9 in Bangladesh, with Islamist extremists taking credit for the attack. At right, police collect evidence at the murder scene.

In an editorial after the latest murder, the Guardian wrote, "Like Raif Badawi, imprisoned and flogged in Saudi Arabia, the brave men who have been murdered are guilty of nothing more than honesty and integrity. Those are virtues that fundamentalists and fanatics cannot stand."
In January 2014, As-Sahab Media released a video message from al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, entitled "Bangladesh: A Massacre Behind a Wall of Silence." Zawahiri said,

My Muslim brothers in Bangladesh, I invite you to confront this crusaders' onslaught against Islam, being orchestrated by the leading criminals in the Sub-continent and the West against Islam, the Prophet of Islam and the Islamic creed, so that they may turn you into slaves of a despotic and disbelieving system. ... I invite you to launch a massive public uprising in defense of Islam, against the enemies of Islam. I invite the leading scholars of Bangladesh to fulfill the role Islam has given them.
...
I invite you [Bangladeshi Islamic scholars] to firmly hold on to the principle of the supreme authority of the Shariah, and its primacy over man-made constitutions and laws, so that it governs the will of the masses, rather than being governed by their will, or by any other authority. I invite you to lead the masses to lead the masses in a vast and... popular uprising (intifada) whose tide does not recede, nor its dynamism subside, until the Shariah of Islam governs the land of Islam.
...
The reality of democracy is that it knows no religion, values or principles. Everything is right as long as it gets the majority of votes. It was a democratic Britain that occupied Muslim lands, killed millions, and robbed its resources for centuries. It was a democratic Britain that promised Palestine to the Jews. It was the democratic Britain that handed over Palestine to the Zionists before withdrawing from Palestine.

Zawahiri's call went viral among Muslims in Bangladesh, where they constitute approximately 90.4% of the population.
In 2014, when Asian and African Muslims were asked in a Pew survey whether suicide bombing or other forms of violence against civilian targets could be justified to defend Islam from an enemy, 47% percent of Bangladeshi Muslims said yes. They represented the highest number, after Gaza (62%). The number of those who those justified suicide bombings and other violence is far higher than those in Malaysia (18%), Indonesia (9%) and Pakistan (3%).
Imran H. Sarker, spokesman for Gonojagorn Manch, a secular movement in Bangladesh, has accused the government of trying to cover up the murder of bloggers for its political gain.
It seems clear, therefore, why the dissidents, atheists and secularists in Bangladesh remain unassisted by the society and the government.

Obama Lie Number (We Have Lost Count)--Al Qaeda Is Far From Defeated!

Al Qaeda controls more territory than ever in Middle East

Peter Bergen and Jennifer Rowland - CNN,  January 8th, 2014

From around Aleppo in western Syria to small areas of Falluja in central Iraq, al Qaeda now controls territory that stretches more than 400 miles across the heart of the Middle East, according to English and Arab language news accounts as well as accounts on jihadist websites.

Indeed, al Qaeda appears to control more territory in the Arab world than it has done at any time in its history.

The focus of al Qaeda's leaders has always been regime change in the Arab world in order to install Taliban-style regimes. Al Qaeda's leader Ayman al-Zawahiri acknowledged as much in his 2001 autobiography, “Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet,” when he explained that the most important strategic goal of al Qaeda was to seize control of a state, or part of a state, somewhere in the Muslim world, explaining that, “without achieving this goal our actions will mean nothing.”

Now al-Zawahiri is closer to his goal than he has ever been. On Friday al-Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq seized control of parts of the city of Falluja and parts of the city of Ramadi, both of which are located in Iraq's restive Anbar Province.

Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation and the author of “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden — From 9/11 to Abbottabad.” Jennifer Rowland is a graduate student at Harvard University's Kennedy School.

Anbar is home to predominantly Sunni Muslims, who feel that that the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki treats the Sunnis as second-class citizens.

Sectarian tensions in Anbar recently burst into several all-out revolts against the government, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as the al-Qaeda affiliate there is known, quickly seized the opportunity to notch some battlefield victories.

Government forces increased their presence around Falluja in response and on Tuesday tribal leaders issued a statement urging people who had fled the city or stopped reporting to work to return.

Iraq violence: Assessing U.S. role al Qaeda re-emerges in fight over Iraq

ISIS is also operating in Syria, where it has established a presence in many areas of the Aleppo and Idlib Governorates in the northwest. In August, ISIS launched a propaganda series on video highlighting their activities in Syria, which includes interviews with fighters; the “graduation” of a group of mujahedin “cubs” (aged about 7 to 10 years old) from training, and sermons at local mosques preaching al Qaeda's interpretation of Islam.

The al-Nusra front has claimed to control parts of at least a dozen Syrian towns. Those include sections of the ancient city of the Aleppo in the northwest, where fighters have been filmed running a community fair and preaching al Qaeda's values to crowds of children.

The group has also released videos on jihadist websites claiming that it is providing services to the people of several towns in the governorate of Idlib, which borders the Aleppo Governorate to the west. Al Nusra claims that it is a quasi-government and service-provider in the towns of Binnish, Taum, and Saraqib.

Al-Nusra fighters allied to al Qaeda function like a government in areas they control in Syria. The group provides daily deliveries of bread, free running water and electricity, a health clinic, and a strict justice system based on Sharia law in the eastern Syrian city of Ash Shaddadi, where it also took control of the city's wheat silos and oil wells.

In September a CNN reporting team concluded, “Al Qaeda has swept to power with the aim of imposing a strict Islamist ideology on Syrians across large swathes of Syria's rebel-held north.”

In sum, al Qaeda affiliates now control much of northern and northwestern Syria as well as some parts of eastern Syria, as well as much of Anbar province, which is around a third of Iraqi territory.

Al-Nusra is engaged in a protracted fight to maintain a foothold in the eastern city of Dayr al-Zur, where, as in Ash Shaddadi, the militants have their hands on an energy source, this time in the form of natural gas.

On Friday the group released a video on a jihadist website claiming it was grinding some 10 tons of wheat each day to provide bread for the residents of Dayr al-Zur. In the video, a bearded man who identifies himself as part of al-Nusra gives a National Geographic-esque tour of a wheat silo where bags of wheat are filled, weighed, and transported to a bread-making facility, where industrial mixers churn dough.

Similar videos released throughout the second half of 2013 depict al-Nusra fighters providing health care, legal services, electricity and food to civilians in the cities of Daraa, Homs, Hama, and even the suburbs of the capital Damascus, where the government still enjoys fairly secure authority.

Al Qaeda's expansion in Syria will not continue unchecked, though. Many Syrians are unhappy about being ruled by the strict jihadist militants. Over the past several days fighting has broken out between ISIS and an alliance of various rebel factions in Syria, including al-Qaeda's other affiliate in the country, the al-Nusra Front. This fighting has taken a toll on ISIS, which has been forced to withdraw from a number of key Syrian towns as a result of attacks by the other rebel groups.

The infighting amongst Syrian rebels is not good news for the fate of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but it could prompt the United States to increase its shipments of arms and supplies to “moderate” Syrian rebels in the FSA. However, even an increase in U.S. aid to the rebels would be unlikely to sway the conflict significantly, which means al-Assad will remain in power and the war will continue as it has over the past three years.

Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday that the United States will “do everything that is possible to help” the Iraqi government control al Qaeda's expansion in Anbar, but stressed that no American troops would be sent back to the Middle Eastern nation .

Last month, the United States quietly sent Hellfire missiles and surveillance drones to the Iraqi government to support their fight against increasing al Qaeda-related violence.

This weaponry is unlikely to make a substantial difference to the mounting violence in Iraq where violence has returned to the levels it was in 2008, near the height of the Iraq war. Indeed, by any reasonable standard Iraq is now mired back in a civil war. Last year almost 8,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the conflict, according to the UN.

For the United States the widening reach of al Qaeda in the Middle East doesn't necessarily translate into an immediate threat at home. So far only a handful of Americans have fought in the Syrian conflict alongside al Qaeda's affiliates there so concerns about some kind of “blowback” from the Syrian war in the U.S. are, at this point, unfounded,

European countries are rightly concerned, however. Many European countries have seen their citizens drawn to the Syrian war; more than a hundred from Britain and many dozens from countries like Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, according to multiple European officials we have spoken to. These countries are concerned that the retuning veterans of the Syrian conflict might launch terrorist attacks in Europe.

In October for instance, British authorities arrested militants who were allegedly planning a terrorist attack. Two British officials who work on counterterrorism issues told us that that the militants had recently traveled to Syria.

The United States and its allies should therefore make a careful effort to track the foreign fighters who have joined jihadist groups fighting in Syria.