Target IPS, IAS Officers: Al-Qaeda Tells Indian Muslims
New Age
Islam Edit Bureau
04 July 2016
• Target IPS, IAS Officers: Al Qaeda Tells Indian Muslims
By Hindustan Times
• Indian Agencies Warned Dhaka of Terror Strikes
By Praveen Swami
• All That We Are Mourning
By Ibtisam Ahmed
• Bangla Siege: Blame Deep Dysfunction In Politics And State Institutions
By Hindustan Times
• Terror Strikes Dhaka: Bangladeshi Government Needs A Broad-Spectrum Approach To Fight The Menace
By TOI Edit
• The Horror In Dhaka
By The Hindu
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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Target IPS, IAS officers: Al Qaeda tells Indian Muslims
Jul 04, 2016
Chief of al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), Maulana Asim Umar, has asked Indian Muslims to start jihad by killing senior Indian Police Service (IPS) and Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers.
Umar, whose original name is Sanaul Haq, was declared chief of al Qaeda’s offshoot for the Indian Subcontinent in a video released by group head Ayman al-Zawahiri in September 2014.
In his statement, Umar said the state and its departments were equally responsible for the incidents against Muslims in India.
“Otherwise how could anyone dare to just take knives and cut Muslims like vegetables? We say if the Indian state is not involved in the massacre of Muslims, then Muslim youth should also be given free hand, as given to Hindu mobsters during riots,” said the statement put out by SITE Intelligence Group, a non-governmental counter terror group that researches and analyses terror threats.
Read: US adds al Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent to ‘terror’ list
According to counter-terror officials, Umar was a native of Sambhal in UP before leaving India for Pakistan in 1999.
He said Indian Muslims should follow the example of their brethren in Syria, adding that they should look at the example of Europe where one single Mujahid after another has disturbed the entire continent. “Kill senior officers of institutions and administrative departments that get (people to) start these riots. Target IPS and IAS officers, cause them financial losses,” said the statement.
Taking note of the statement, National Investigation Agency chief Sharad Kumar said, “We will analyse the statement.”
The US state department designated AQIS a ‘foreign terrorist organisation’ and Umar a ‘global terrorist’ only a few days ago.
Source: hindustantimes.com/india-news/target-ips-ias-officers-al-qaeda-asks-indian-muslims/story-N1f8E3CXEAT9VVeg4b1a3L.html
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Indian Agencies Warned Dhaka of Terror Strikes
By Praveen Swami
July 4, 2016
INDIA’S intelligence services had warned of a heightened risk of an Islamic State strike on Dhaka in a series of assessments shared last month, a senior Bangladesh security official told The Indian Express.
The assessments did not contain any intelligence that could have directly helped prevent Friday’s attack, but flagged evidence that Bangladeshi extremists were training at secret facilities in India, said the official. They also warned of heightened Islamic State propaganda, he added.
“The Indian warnings were one of many pieces of intelligence that jihadists were planning a major operation. There were some pieces of the puzzle available to us, but not enough to piece together a picture of the plot,” said the Bangladeshi official.
Bangladesh investigators, another official said, are now focusing their efforts on understanding the training and logistics behind the terrorists who carried out the Dhaka strike — timed to coincide with the last Friday of Ramzan, one of the holiest days of the month of fasting.
In April, the Islamic State’s house magazine Dabiq had threatened future strikes in Bangladesh. And since 2014, the Jama’at-ul-Mujahideen — the main Bangladeshi terror outfit that has now branded itself the Islamic State — had staged a series of execution-style killings of foreign aid workers, religious minorities and political progressives using small arms and machetes. It had also conducted a number of bombings — some, allegedly, from stocks prepared at a secret factory in Burdwan, West Bengal.
India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) detectives, who probed a 2014 explosion at the Burdwan facility, also said several men had been imparted bomb-making skills there.
In September 2015, police had discovered a training camp in Daukhanagar, where Jama’at-ul-Mujahideen cadre had imparted basic courses to recruits on using arms.
This April, Assam Police arrested seven people from Chirang district on charges of running a Jama’at-ul-Mujahideen training camp in Amgrui village. Local cleric Joynal Abedin, police alleged, had been recruiting young men from nearby villages to join the camp.
There are large, fairly ungoverned areas along the India-Bangladesh border where arms training could pass undetected for quite some time,” said an Assam Police officer. “Things are further complicated by the fact that there are a large number of criminalised insurgent groups in the region, who could potentially be providers of assault rifles and other weapons,” said the officer.
Source: indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/dhaka-terrror-attack-restaurant-hostages-india-intelligence-services-islamic-state-strike-terrorists-2892307/
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All That We Are Mourning
By Ibtisam Ahmed
The attack on an upmarket cafe in Dhaka must not be seen in isolation from the extremist violence that has gripped Bangladesh for over a year
Bangladesh is in mourning. Not just the two-day official period following the heinous events of July 1, it’s been in mourning for over a year, as it loses its grip on a society that had been built on secularism and compassion. For over a year now, there has been a rise in religious intolerance and targeted violence against secularist and rational voices. Bloggers, academics, priests, spiritual leaders, LGBTQ+ activists, religious minorities, aid workers, tailors — all killed for not fitting a specific definition of piousness by Islamic extremists. Following this painful trend in violence, the attack on Dhaka’s Holey Artisan Bakery/cafe has raised the bloodshed to unseen levels. Yet it would be foolish to consider it an isolated incident.
A Year of Living Dangerously
Since early 2015, attacks on religious minorities and critics of Islamic extremism have been focussed on one or, in a handful of cases, two individuals being killed by mobs. The modus operandi has been the use of machetes and knives, with the majority of victims being selected for openly advocating a more tolerant society that fits in with Bangladesh’s secular Constitution. While the first few victims openly called themselves atheists — seen in some quarters as a social taboo, but never a criminal offence — the one common aspect tying all of them together was that they failed to adhere to a strict interpretation of Islam favoured by extremist groups operating in the region.
Contrary to some early reports, foreigners had been targeted in these attacks as well. Italian aid worker Cesare Tavella and Japanese agriculturalist Kunio Hoshi were killed in separate incidents late last year, the first targeted killings of foreign nationals in the country since 2004. The Islamic State and al-Qaeda have been competing to take credit for the string of murders, but there is no definitive proof of either group’s involvement. Both groups have also claimed responsibility for the siege in the capital’s wealthy Gulshan district this weekend, although both local intelligence and foreign agencies such as the U.S. State Department are yet to authenticate the claims. Like in previous attacks, the perpetrators’ exact motives are still to be determined.
What sets it apart, however, is the sheer scale of the violence. Blades have given way to guns, and single targets have been replaced by an entire building of casualties. Twenty hostages have been confirmed dead so far. In a heart-breaking coincidence, the majority of them were Italians and Japanese, with one Indian also among the dead and another Italian yet to be accounted for. Three Bangladeshis were among the hostage deaths alongside two others, policemen killed during an initial explosion. Chillingly, reports from the Army indicate that most hostages were already dead when the rescue operation was launched, with signs of torture with sharp weapons. Eyewitnesses have confirmed that the assailants demanded that the hostages recite passages from the Koran from memory, with failure resulting in their deaths.
Terrifyingly, this would indicate that extremist forces have become emboldened by the lack of response to the previous killings. The fact that they chose a target in the heart of the diplomatic zone, with few avenues of escape and with the hallmarks of a reckless suicide attempt rather than traditional hostage-taking, only lends credence to this fear. July 1 was not the first incident of violence by any means, but it certainly marks a turning point.
The Blame Game
The rescue of at least 13 hostages, with some reports claiming a higher number of 18, has been heralded by the authorities as a sign of success. Government officials, including the Prime Minister, have condemned the attack wholeheartedly but have said that they are largely pleased with the attempts of the security forces. Unfortunately, that confidence is not easily shared.
Muddying the waters even further has been the refusal by both government and Opposition to tackle the issue of growing extremism. The former has been steadfast in its vague accusations against the Opposition parties, refusing to consider any links with other organisations as well as the rise in extremist ideology more widely. It does not help that it has openly stated in the past that citizens should be careful not to hurt religious sentiment, effectively blaming free-thinkers for their own demise, with many of the perpetrators of the individual killings yet to be caught.
However, it would be naive to suggest that the Opposition parties have not played a part. Having exploited political Islam as part of their platform for decades, they perfected the colonial legacy of using religious prejudice and scapegoating in the socio-political landscape. That they have vocally criticised the government and the government alone, for the recent violence shows that scoring political points has become the end-game for both sides rather than actually solving the problem.
Additionally, the wider global influence of reactionary pan-Islamism from West Asia, especially in the light of growing distrust of Muslims in the wake of the War on Terror, has had a toxic effect. Bangladesh has been inching towards a dangerous precipice for a long time, and the latest attack may have given it a bigger push than anyone could have predicted. More people and places in the country will now perceive themselves to be unsafe.
‘Stay Safe’
“Stay safe” is becoming the most common way to say farewell. Making matters even worse is the identities of the attackers. While their affiliations are still unconfirmed — one hostage-taker is in custody and awaits interrogation — it is looking likely that they were all from urban, largely well-to-do backgrounds.
This goes against the stereotypical profile of extremists indoctrinated through religious education in madrasas. If the assailants do indeed go against the grain, then the extent to which extremism has taken hold needs to be seriously reconsidered.
Bangladesh was founded on the principle of secularism. Despite its Muslim-majority population, its social fabric has been strongest when the multitude of cultures and faiths within its borders have coexisted. Instead of taking recourse to superficial platitudes, the authorities need to unite in their efforts to tackle what is fast turning into the single greatest threat to the nation since its independence.
Ibtisam Ahmed is at the School of Politics and IR at the University of Nottingham, and is researching the ideological conceptualisation and legacy of the British Raj.
Source: thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/bangladesh-dhaka-seige-and-attack/article8804276.ece
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Bangla Siege: Blame Deep Dysfunction in Politics and State Institutions
Hindustan Times
Jul 03, 2016
A wounded police personnel is helped by a colleague, after gunmen stormed the Holey Artisan restaurant and took hostages, in the Gulshan area of Dhaka, Bangladesh, July 1 (Reuters)
Bangladesh endured its own Mumbai-like suicide attack over the weekend when heavily armed terrorists targeted a bakery frequented by foreigners and took them hostage before being were gunned down by security forces. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility; whether or not the group that has ravaged Syria and Iraq was involved in the Dhaka attack will be established in the days to come but this conscious targeting of foreigners appears geared to exacerbate the conflict between the State establishment and extremist forces that have long waged a bitter and bloody battle.
The Sheikh Hasina government’s counterterrorism policies will be under a lot more international pressure following this attack. That sort of scrutiny does occasionally helps as with the case of the Lashkar-e-Toiba after the Mumbai attacks, when the Pakistani establishment was forced to rein in the violence of the group if not its infrastructure. Ms Hasina’s government unfortunately has nowhere that kind of leverage as a range of Islamist groups has been relentlessly challenging the authority of her government, and have, over the last year, launched several brutal, often unspeakably violent attacks on bloggers, atheist activists, publishers, Hindus, Shias and foreigners.
Extremism and terrorism have proved almost impossible to tackle in Bangladesh as they themselves are a product of the deep dysfunction in the country’s politics and State institutions. Ms Hasina’s Awami League party and government is both a product and a driver of that dysfunction. Created via a bloody civil war in 1971, Bangladesh has a very violent political culture and a gridlocked politics dominated by two warring parties and, as pointed by the International Crisis Group (ICG), it has extremely partisan State structures whereby institutions like the civil service, police and judiciary are manned or manipulated by party faithful. Hasina’s government is opposed to violent Islamists but it has also presided over widespread repression of opposition parties like Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Jamaat-e-Islami. This and the partisan nature of the criminal justice system has bred alienation and enhanced the appeal of extremist organisations and terror groups. Furthermore, as a politically-freighted bureaucracy is too invested in the continuation of a regime and prone to overreach, the Hasina government has also cracked down on the media and sections of the civil society, further undermining its legitimacy.
Bangladesh is experiencing a crisis of public institutions of which terrorism is one manifestation. The focus now will be on finding the conspirators but the country desperately needs a new form of politics and a sequence of steps that will manage social tensions. Right now that sounds like wishful thinking.
Source: hindustantimes.com/editorials/bangla-attack-blame-the-deep-dysfunction-in-the-country-s-politics-and-state-institutions/story-GRyDEewvntAYboL7Sh3T9L.html
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Terror Strikes Dhaka: Bangladeshi Government Needs a Broad-Spectrum Approach To Fight The Menace
TOI Edit
July 4, 2016
The horrific terror attack at the upscale Holey Artisan cafe in the Bangladeshi capital city of Dhaka, where Islamist terrorists took hostages before killing 20 of them, has necessitated a serious re-evaluation of the threat perception. Unlike the machete-wielding murderers of bloggers in Bangladesh, the gun-toting terrorists at Holey Artisan – who were neutralised by Bangladeshi security forces after a 10 hour siege – were well organised. That they chose to target a restaurant frequented by foreigners shows clear objective. The 20 dead include 9 Italians, 7 Japanese, an American and 19-year-old Indian Tarishi Jain. This indicates the terrorists wanted to send out the message that Bangladesh is unsafe for foreigners.
While the Islamic State terror group has claimed responsibility for this attack, hitherto the Bangladeshi government has refused to acknowledge the presence of transnational terror outfits in its country. Instead, it has blamed local extremists. But at this point it’s irrelevant to make such distinctions. The terrorists may well be local but they are inspired by a global radical Islamist agenda. For Bangladesh’s anti-terror response to be effective, Dhaka must take this into consideration. Focussing solely on local groups won’t do.
Second, Bangladesh’s fight against terror has been hobbled by domestic political acrimony. The ruling Awami League and its opponent BNP must work out a modus vivendi to fight the extremists. Otherwise, if Bangladesh falls under the global radical Islamist yoke, the country as a whole will suffer. Dhaka can no longer take a homeopathic approach to fight the Islamist terror virus, which has already infected Bangladeshi society.
Source: blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-editorials/terror-strikes-dhaka-bangladeshi-government-needs-a-broad-spectrum-approach-to-fight-the-menace/
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The Horror In Dhaka
The Hindu
The attack in an upmarket café in Dhaka has left 28 people dead, including six gunmen, and Bangladesh clearly shaken. Over the past three years, the country has seen at least 40 targeted killings by militants, with each new attack raising fears about the growing clout of radicalised groups. The latest represents a marked escalation. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the nearly 11-hour siege. Till now the Bangladesh government has never accepted that the IS operates in the country. Even so, it is clear that IS-style rhetoric against minorities and foreigners and the use of horrifying violence are influencing Bangladeshi militants. Of late, gay rights activists, Hindu priests, secular bloggers and Shia mosques have all come under attack. In the latest, assailants separated foreigners from locals and hacked them to death one by one. The timing of the attack, at the start of the Ramzan holidays, may also be significant. The IS has called upon its supporters to attack “crusaders” and “apostates” during the holy month of Ramzan.
The Dhaka attack takes the fight to the government of Sheikh Hasina. For months, the government tried to play down the threats from jihadists, saying those were the acts of local groups. Its focus was on weakening the political opposition, including the Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party. When liberal and secular activists were attacked, the government partly blamed them for “insulting religious sensibilities”. When the IS and al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the murders, the authorities said no foreign terrorist group was involved. It is only recently that the government launched a major crackdown on radicalised groups, but over this period the extremists have grown in strength to carry out mass attacks. The IS and al-Qaeda see Bangladesh as an arena of potential expansion. The IS had released audio propaganda in Bangla.
The simmering tensions between the government and the Islamist organisations have lent radicalised groups an opportunity to drive their agenda and find recruits. To address this, the government needs both short- and long-term strategies. The immediate task is of course to address the worsening security situation. The targeted killings started three years ago, and the government has appeared to hold itself back on pursuing the murderers and their handlers. The long-term challenge is to check growing radicalisation. In this context, the ruling Awami League, perceived to be at the liberal end of the political spectrum, must step back and reconsider its high-handedness in dealing with opposition and dissent. If Bangladesh’s democracy is hollowed out, only the extremists will benefit.
Source: thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/dhaka-cafe-attack-the-horror-in-dhaka/article8804595.ece
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/target-ips,-ias-officers-al/d/107852