Staff Reporter :
The Islamic State (IS) militant group has warned that it was preparing for fresh attacks in Bangladesh “to rise and expand in Bengal.”
The group dedicated a full article to their activities in Bangladesh or “Bengal” as it refers to the country in the latest edition of its online propaganda magazine Dabiq where its strategic expansion to countries like Bangladesh was discussed at length, said The Hindu, an Indian based newspaper on Sunday.
The article titled ‘The Revival of Jihad in Bengal’ claimed that while IS was busy preparing for further attacks, the secular Awami League government continued to “twist the facts” on the ground and played a blame game.
That perhaps refers to the claims by the Bangladesh government that there was no Islamic State presence in the country and that elements out to destabilise it were behind the murders of two foreigners.
The IS also referred to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)-Jamaat alliance as a ‘coalition of murtaddin (apostates)’.
“The former government, which consisted mainly of a coalition of murtaddin from both the BNP and the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, foolishly thought that the call of tawhid, jihad, and khilafat would be crushed by the sacrifice of a few righteous scholars,” read a paragraph of the article.However, the IS article calls the banned Islamic militant outfit Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) a “proper jihad organisation in Bangladesh based on the Quran and Sunnah.”
“A security cell belonging to the soldiers of the Khilafah in Bengal assassinated an Italian crusader named Cesare Tavella in the streets of Gulshan in the city of Dhaka and few days later another security cell targeted a Japanese citizen in the northern region of Rangpur,” the magazine said reiterating its claim earlier circulated by the U.S. based monitoring website, SITE, of carrying out the attacks.
“These back-to-back attacks have caused havoc among the citizens of the crusader nations and their allies living in Bengal and forced their diplomats, tourists and expats to limit their movements and live in a constant state of fear,” it claimed.
The article claimed that Bangladesh had been drowned in “shirk and bidah” – polytheism and religious innovation for hundreds of years due to the “effects of both European colonisation and Hindu cultural invasion.”
It concluded by saying that the soldiers of the so-called caliphate would continue to rise and expand in “Bengal” and would continue to carry out acts of terrorism.
