“Bangladesh has a terrorism problem it cannot ignore”, Firstpost, Aug 25, 2026.
“Bangladesh may not have a terrorism problem on the scale of, say, Pakistan. But it does have a terrorism problem, and pretending otherwise has repeatedly allowed a smaller, evolving threat to be rediscovered only after it has changed form. The latest warning about al-Qaeda in Bangladesh should neither be sensationalised nor dismissed.
Early this month, the United Nations Security Council’s Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team reported “some concern” that al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) was attempting to exploit Bangladesh to establish cells. The wording was cautious, as intelligence assessments of this kind usually are. It did not claim that al-Qaeda had established some sprawling organisation inside Bangladesh.
AQIS is increasingly understood to operate through small, dispersed logistical, financial, and operational networks rather than the conspicuous structures associated with an earlier generation of jihadist organisations. Yet Bangladesh’s Home Minister, Salahuddin Ahmed, responded by saying that the government was not taking the report into account, describing what he understood of it as assumption-based.
The response matters because Bangladesh has been here before. Again and again, periods of declining terrorist violence have been interpreted not simply as counterterrorism success but as evidence that the underlying problem has disappeared. This has happened under governments of different political colours. It happened under Sheikh Hasina, whose government often insisted that Islamic State had no organisational presence in Bangladesh even while Bangladeshi terrorists were adopting its ideology and carrying out attacks in its name……………..”
Read the full article at Firstpost.
