Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has warned her UK counterpart David Cameron that he needs to do more to combat radicalism amid concerns that British jihadis are fuelling a rise in extremism in Bangladesh, the world’s third most populous Muslim nation, reports The Guardian from London.
Security and intelligence experts in Dhaka say British jihadis are stoking an Islamist revival in Bangladesh, schooling a new generation of young religious radicals sympathetic to ISIS, says the newspaper report.
Recruiters and extremist funding from Britain’s Bengali diaspora communities are encouraging locals to join the cause of international jihad, and the number of Bangladeshis involved in salafi groups is rising, the experts say. “The British government should take more steps on the ground,” Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina told the newspaper.  “Jamaat has a strong influence in east London. That’s true. They are collecting money, they are sending money.”
The warnings come after the arrest in Dhaka last month of Touhidur Rahman, a British man of Bangladeshi origin, who is alleged by police to be the “mastermind” behind the machete murders of two secular bloggers by Islamists earlier this year.
Several other cases linking individuals from Britain’s Bengali population to extremist groups active in Bangladesh and elsewhere, including Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB), Islamic State and al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), have come to light in recent months.
Most recently, it emerged that two of the three British citizens recruited by ISIS and killed by British and US drone strikes in Syria last month – Ruhul Amin and Reyaad Khan – were of Bangladeshi origin.
Security analysts, intelligence specialists and former officials in Dhaka warn that Bangladesh, a severely impoverished, low-middle income country with about 160 million people, is increasingly ripe for radicalisation.Although the number of domestic terror attacks has fallen, in part due to a government crackdown, Sunni Muslim Bangladesh is undergoing a fundamentalist revival akin to that in Pakistan and several Middle East countries, the analysts said, and the lull in terrorist activity could quickly be reversed.
“ISIS has its eye on Bangladesh,” said an ex-army intelligence specialist, who like most of the people interviewed for this report asked not be identified.
“Unofficially, the number of Bangladeshis going to fight in Syria and Iraq is up to 30. Bangladesh is becoming a transit route to Isis from India. We also have growing numbers of Bangladeshi diaspora guys coming here from Britain to recruit,” the intelligence specialist said.