By Samanth Subramanian / The New Yorker
On Friday [July 1] evening, when gunmen burst into the Holey
Artisan Bakery, in Dhaka, the restaurant was quiet. Few of its regular Muslim
customers were dining out, having just broken their Ramadan fasts at home, so
the tables were occupied largely by expatriates: a group of Italians out for
dinner, another cluster of Japanese, Sri Lankans, and Indians. This was a crowd
typical of Gulshan, a neighborhood of diplomats and corporate executives,
which, with its tranquil streets and watercolor lake views, feels a long way
from the traffic-choked bedlam elsewhere in Dhaka.
Storming the Holey Artisan Bakery was, in other words, a
result of diligent homework. It wasn’t until the next morning, ten hours later,
that Bangladesh Army commandos broke the siege, killing six attackers and
arresting a seventh. Most of the twenty slain victims were foreigners; one, a
sophomore at Emory University, was an American of Bangladeshi origin. Thirteen
people, patrons as well as staff, survived. Through the long, terrible night, one
eyewitness said, the attackers tested the hostages, torturing or murdering them
if they couldn’t recite verses from the Koran. “We will not kill Bengalis,” one
of the gunmen said, according to the Times. “We will only kill foreigners.”
The attack, which was subsequently claimed by the Islamic
State, through its Amaq information agency, provides a tragically clarifying
moment in Bangladesh’s recent history of violence. Since 2013, at least forty
people across the country have been killed in separate attacks—on the streets
or in their homes, many sliced to death with machetes. Among the first victims
were several secular bloggers, including an American, Avijit Roy, who was
killed in February, 2015; foreigners, publishers, minority Hindus and
Christians, and gay-rights activists have also been murdered.
This spree of violence has punctured the self-constructed
reputation of the Awami League, the ruling party, as the sole guardian of the
secular fiber of Sunni-majority Bangladesh. In its successful election campaigns
of 2008 and 2014, the Awami League had promised to be tough on terror, and to
prosecute those who had collaborated with Pakistani Islamists to impede
Bangladesh’s war of liberation, in 1971. The tensions of the war have lurked
beneath the surface of the country’s politics ever since, boiling over in 2013,
when students and bloggers organized massive protests, calling for the harshest
possible sentences for convicted war criminals. But shortly thereafter, when
assassins began to kill bloggers, often in public and in open daylight, the
government responded weakly. Once, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina even suggested
that the murdered writers ought to have kept their controversial opinions on
Islam to themselves.
Over the past three years, Bangladesh has been unable to
ascertain the force behind these executions. Some of the killings, including
Roy’s, were claimed by Ansarullah Bangla Team, a local group of militants that
spoke largely through its Twitter handle; a police official described
Ansarullah as an Al Qaeda affiliate, but in a tweet Ansarullah bragged that Roy
had been killed to avenge the United States’ actions againstISIS. Yet the
government has denied the presence of either Al Qaeda or ISIS on Bangladeshi
soil; one of its ministers, speaking to me late last year, was more eager to
blame his party’s primary political opposition, the Bangladesh National Party,
and the B.N.P.’s proscribed Islamist ally, the Jamaat-e-Islami. Last month,
under pressure to act, the government arrested more than eleven thousand
people, including a hundred and forty-five suspected Islamic militants; police
officials said that they were cracking down on every form of crime, from theft
to assault, but the B.N.P. complained that the raids were a cover to detain its
workers. By way of further complication, it wasn’t uncommon to hear the
paranoid theory that the government’s security agencies had carried out some of
the murders, to give itself an excuse to turn Bangladesh into more of a police
state.
Friday’s attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery, however, leaves
little room for doubt about the growing influence of ISIS in the country,
Amarnath Amarasingam, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on
Extremism, told me. “The most important thing here is that ISIS has taken
credit, and they don’t take credit for things they didn’t do,” he said. “Now,
this doesn’t mean Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is calling these guys in Dhaka and
telling them what to do. It doesn’t mean these fighters were in direct contact
with the top leadership or funded by them. What you can say is that linkages
exist.” Even if the discontents are local, the allegiance is now global.
On Saturday, Amarasingam tweeted out photos of five of the
attackers, which were first published on ISIS media channels. “Here they are
again with names . . . and, ugh, smiling faces,” he wrote. “Definitely shows
some serious pre-planning.” The photos show young men with starter goatees,
distinctly South Asian in appearance, wearing black tunics and red-and-white
kaffiyehs. They stand in front of the ISIS banner and hold automatic weapons at
the same angle, pointed just to the left of their feet, their forefingers
resting loosely on the trigger guards. In captions, we learn their given
kunyas, or Arabic noms de guerre. They are squinting into the light, and their
smiles are shockingly sunny, as if they were posing for yearbook photos.
The fact that these photos were taken, to be released after
the siege ended, reveals an element of meticulous organization. Some of the
people who were killed in the Holey Artisan Bakery were cut up with cleavers or
machetes, and although this was not necessarily a signature of ISIS operations,
Amarasingam said, “these attacks sometimes do have a sort of weird local
flavor.” The gunmen had clearly planned to take photos of the carnage,
mid-siege, and transmit them for publication on ISIS channels, but, when they
snatched smartphones from survivors for this purpose, the 3G signal proved
flimsy, so the restaurant staff was ordered to switch on the Wi-Fi network. One
of the gunmen, survivors recalled, had also remembered to pack a laptop.
Still, despite signs that the attacks were the handiwork of
ISIS sympathizers, Asaduzzaman Khan, Bangladesh’s home minister, refused
afterward to acknowledge that the government is dealing with serious terrorism,
rather than an extraordinarily violent brand of party politics. On Sunday, he
said that the gunmen were members of yet another homegrown, long-banned Islamic
militia, the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, not supporters of ISIS. Asked why
the young men, who had gone to an élite school in Dhaka, would choose to become
militants, Khan replied, “It has become a fashion.”
Such denials have begun to sound both rote and specious.
Khan may be correct in implying that the disaffection driving these men to
violence flows from the frictions and problems of Bangladeshi society, rather
than the appeal of a global caliphate. But, given the sort of spectacular
horror that Dhaka has just witnessed, it appears that ISIS has found firm traction
within a segment of the populace. To forestall further acts of terror,
Bangladesh’s government will have to face up to that grim new reality.
Samanth Subramanian is a New Delhi-based journalist and the
author of ”This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War.”
No comments:
Post a Comment