The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has claimed responsibility for gunning down an Italian aid worker in the diplomatic quarter of Bangladesh’s capital, according to an intelligence group that monitors threats from armed groups. ISIL’s claim on Monday could not be immediately verified, but if confirmed would mark its first attack in Bangladesh, a secular country with a predominantly Muslim population. The South Asian nation has been struggling in recent months with the rapid rise of hard-line Islamic groups, banning several that have been blamed for killing four secular bloggers this year. Police in Dhaka, the capital, said they had no leads in tracing the three unidentified assailants who, riding on a single motorcycle, drove up alongside Italian citizen Cesare Tavella and shot him Monday night. ISIL said in a statement dated Monday that a “security detachment” had tracked and killed Tavella with “silenced weapons” in Dhaka, according to the SITE intelligence group’s website. The armed group warned that “citizens of the crusader coalition” would not be safe in Muslim nations. Almost 90 percent of Bangladesh’s 160 million people are Muslim.
The response of the Bangladesh government officials to the attack has been a regrettably familiar one. Much like the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Bengali approach is one of denial about the modus operandi and creeping danger of IS. When Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan says: “We have only heard about IS in Bangladesh but haven’t found any of them”, he might well be echoing Pakistan’s own Chaudhry Nisar. While a country’s top officials’ need to dispel worries and doubts about the safety of their people is understandable, it is reckless to dismiss alarming truths in favour of a comforting narrative. As argued in this space many times before, the threat of IS is precisely in its capacity to spread into other territories on the back of ideological diffusion. Bangladesh has already been caught in the grip of unprecedented Islamist violence, with many secular bloggers and journalists meeting gruesome deaths at the hands of Islamist groups like the Ansarullah Bangla Team, and this provides an ideal breeding ground for IS to spread its deadly agenda. IS does not have to physically invade a country with its insurgents to conduct operations there, it merely taps into existing terrorist and Islamist networks and appropriates them. Both Bangladesh and Pakistan have plenty of such actors and it will be to their own peril if the governments of these countries continue to ignore the threat.
pk.shafaqna.com
