The murderous attack on a cafe in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in which twenty people were hacked to death with machetes by Islamists, has understandably remained in the headlines as details continue to unfold. It was revealed in these pages yesterday that three of the victims were American college students.
What hasn’t received as much attention is that terrorist attacks like this one go back at least to March 2015, although the number of casualties in Friday’s massacre is unprecedented.
Another detail that has escaped the attention of most western news outlets is the claim that the attacks, while Islamic in nature — the killers shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they carried out their bloody mission — were not the work of ISIS.
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According to Emirates 24 News:
The militants who slaughtered 20 hostages at a Dhaka restaurant were members of a homegrown Bangladeshi militant outfit and not followers of Daesh (IS) group, a senior minister said Sunday.
“They are members of the Jamaeytul Mujahdeen Bangladesh,” Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told AFP, referring to a group which has been banned in Bangladesh for more than a decade.
“They have no connections with Daesh [the Arabic acronym by which the Islamic State identifies itself].”
Daesh has claimed responsibility for the killing of the hostages and two police officers during an 11-hour siege that ended on Saturday but the government has consistently denied that international groups are operating in Bangladesh.
BBC News confirmed this report at approximately noon Sunday, further nothing that the seven attackers, six of whom were shot and killed by police at the end of the siege, were well-educated men who came from wealthy families.
The organization is homegrown and is considered far deadlier than ISIS. Imagine, if you can, a terrorist group more ruthless than ISIS, which has burned its victims alive, drowned them by lowering them in a cage into water, and more.
Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan, when asked by a reporter with Agence France-Presse why men like this would become militants, his chilling answer was, “It has become a fashion.”
Emirates 24 News included a photograph of six of the killers in its article, all of them smiling and looking carefree, which is reproduced below:
