Threat from Jama-atul Mujahideen Bangladesh

by Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury
March 2, 2010

http://www.weeklyblitz.net/567/threat-from-jama-atul-mujahideen-bangladesh

International Crisis Group [ICG], which was listed in 2008 as 'one of the top 10 think-tanks in the world', has published a report on rise on Islamist militancy in Bangladesh.

Ms. Louise Arbour, who acted as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2004 to 2008 and also served in various positions including Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda with the Security Council of the United Nations is presently the President of ICG.

The International Crisis Group is an inde­pendent, non-profit, non-governmental organisation, with some 130 staff members on five continents, working through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict. Crisis Group's international headquarters are in Brussels, with major advocacy offices in Washington DC [where it is based as a legal entity] and New York, a smaller one in London and liaison presences in Moscow and Beijing. The organisation currently operates nine regional offices [in Bishkek, Bogotá, Dakar, Islamabad, Istan­bul, Jakarta, Nairobi, Pristina and Tbilisi] and has local field repre­sen­tation in fourteen additional locations [Baku, Bang­­kok, Beirut, Bujumbura, Damas­cus, Dili, Jeru­sa­lem, Kabul, Kath­man­du, Kinshasa, Port-au-Prince, Pretoria, Sarajevo and Seoul]. Crisis Group cur­rent­ly covers some 60 areas of actual or poten­tial conflict across four continents.

The report published from Brussels office of this international institution said: Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh [JMB], a terrorist organisation, remains active and dangerous despite the decimation of its ranks over the last five years. Its links to the Pakistan group Lashkar-e-Tayyaba [LeT] remain a particularly serious concern. Since its coordinated bombing attack across the country on 17 August 2005, police have arrested hundreds of JMB members; they have also executed every member of its original leadership, including its founder, Shaikh Abdur Rahman. Its last successful attack was in January 2006. The state has succeeded in tackling the Islamist extremist threat to the extent that organisations such as JMB are struggling to survive. But the arrest of 95 JMB operatives since October 2008 and discoveries of huge caches of explosives demonstrate that JMB was able to regroup, recruit and raise funds. No one should take its demise for granted: the possibility of another attack remains, and the government should move quickly to create a planned police-led counter-terrorism force. It should also step up counter-terrorism cooperation, particularly with neighbouring India."

The crackdown after the 2005 bombings yielded a wealth of new data, much of it from court documents, about JMB's origins, aims, training, funding and leadership. While Shaikh Abdur Rahman deliberately sought out contacts with Pakistan-based jihadi organisations, including al-Qaeda and LeT, his goal from the beginning was the establishment of Islamic rule in Bangladesh. He had no broader jihadi agenda, nor was he interested in indiscriminate civilian casualties. JMB focused its attacks on government offices, particularly courts and judges. It was set up with two wings, one for da'wah [religious outreach] stressing the need for Islamic law, and a military wing, whose members, called ehsar, underwent rigorous training. At its height in 2005, it may have had as many as 2,000 ehsar in nine regional divisions, with its stronghold in Rajshahi, in the country's north west. Today, the number may be down to 250.

JMB initially had two main bases of recruitment: the network of mosques and schools associated with the Salafist organisation Ahle Hadith, and the youth wing of the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, called Islamic Chatra Shabir [ICS]. Family networks were also important, with members drawing in their brothers, sons and nephews. Within the top leadership, arranged marriages with women from top JMB families were instrumental in cementing solidarity. Since the 2005 crackdown, there has been less reliance on open da'wah meetings for fear of infiltration and more reliance on four madrasas run by JMB itself. There also appears to be an increase in recruiting from elite schools and universities.

Money was never a problem for JMB and even in its reduced circumstances it appears to have multiple sources of funding. After the crackdown it reduced its reliance on crop donations and a form of taxation in rural areas, again for fear of infiltration, but it draws on income from a number of local businesses. It also appears to rely heavily on donations from JMB members and supporters working in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. In addition, its control of hundi operations – the system of sending money across borders without any electronic transactions that is also known as hawala – has been an important income-earner. The organisation is also involved in transnational crime: the arrest of a key leader in late 2008 revealed JMB's involvement in a counterfeiting ring run by LeT across South Asia, and in arms smuggling across the Indian border.

JMB's current strategy is to rebuild the organisation with a lower profile to gradually launch a Taliban-like military takeover of a district in the north west and use that as a base to establish Islamic law. Given its somewhat depleted resources and the new intelligence available to authorities following important arrests in 2008 and 2009, that goal seems wildly unrealistic. The one quality that the leadership has in abundance, however, is patience.

The danger from JMB is exacerbated by its links to other Bangladeshi and international jihadi groups and to members of the Bangladeshi diaspora in Britain. New information has revealed operational ties to LeT and to al-Muhajiroun, the groups whose members took part in the London underground bombings of July 2005. There has also been collaboration between JMB and a splinter of the once formidable but now diminished Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, Bangladesh [HUJI-B].

Bangladesh's political mainstream has long understood the danger posed by JMB but has either deliberately used it for narrow political ends, as during the coalition government led by the Bangladesh National Party [BNP] from 2006 to 2007, or been distracted by other concerns. The current Awami League government is especially aware of the problem as its members have been victims of attacks. But internal wrangling, lack of coordination between security agencies and the absence of a single counter-terrorism force have undermined any sustained effort to dismantle the organisation.

Commenting on re-organizing of the Bangladeshi terror group, the report said, JMB's resilience and current capacity are best assessed from looking at how it managed recruitment, training and funding before the 2005 bombings and subsequent crackdown, and what adjustments it made thereafter. JMB, like many other jihadi organisations, is constantly evolving and mutating; past actions are not necessarily indicative of future ones. It seems to have changed from mass to elite recruitment, restricted its rural activities and altered its funding base. While it may have lost hundreds of operatives to arrests and fear of arrest, those that remain are likely to be more fully committed and thus more dangerous.

ICG said, Islamist militancy group JMB was able to grow from 2001-2005 with either passive disinterest, or sometimes active support, from top officials of the Bangladesh National Party [BNP] government.

JMB was founded in 1998 by Shaikh Abdur Rahman out of his desire for a more militant jihadi organisation than then existed in Bangladesh. It was closely associated with the Salafist movement Ahle Hadith, and members were required to follow the movement's thought and practice. In the interests of recruiting as widely as possible, however, Abdur Rahman accommodated different Islamic schools when he found it expedient and his writings borrowed heavily from a broad range of Islamic thinkers ranging from fourteenth century Salafi scholar Ibn Taimiyyah to Jamaat-e Islami founder Maulana Maududi.

From the beginning, JMB's objective was to establish Islamic rule in Bangladesh. The "near enemy" – proponents of democracy in Bangladesh – was more important than the "far enemy", the U.S. and its allies. The organisation grew quickly, building on discontent within existing Islamist organisations. Its golden age was between 1998 and 2003. Virtually unnoticed by intelligence and security agencies, it recruited and trained, raised funds, ran operations and mobilised members without interruption across the north and in selected southern districts such as Chittagong, Jessore and Khulna. Stationed in a makeshift office in Dhaka, Abdur Rahman launched a two
-pronged program, sending JMB members to run extensive da'wah [religious outreach] programs and later, tapping political powerbrokers and jihadi elements willing to support his agenda.

The report said: JMB remains dangerous for Bangladesh and more proactive measures are needed to prevent it regrouping. The government should not let its guard down as it attends to other priorities. Despite the arrests made since late 2005 – especially those since October 2008 – JMB continues to actively recruit, train and raise funds. It proved in 2005 that it could survive the elimination of its leadership and heavy losses in its ranks. It can do so again. JMB's current amir, Saidur Rahman, has proven far more elusive than expected, and powerful veterans Najmul and Sohel Mahfuz also remain at large.

JMB has found new and more secure ways to produce fewer, less experienced but more deeply loyal operatives. Links to LeT and British Bangladeshi militants have injected new capabilities and techniques into JMB's repertoire while diversifying its sources of income, training and weapons. A new willingness to discuss greater collaboration with HUJI-B is especially disconcerting given that together, they pose a far more serious threat to Bangladesh than either could do on its own. By contrast, despite the past Jamaat membership of many senior JMB operatives, there has only been negligible evidence of direct Jamaat support for JMB or any other violent militant organisation.

Meanwhile, according to recently available information from various intelligence sources in Bangladesh, a few hundred activists of Islamist militancy group Loashkar-e-Taiba [LeT] and Joish-e-Muhammed [JeM] are secretly taking training and preparations inside Bangladesh with the goal of staging 'Islamic Revolution'.

Captured members of these notorious militancy groups told Bangladeshi law enforcing agencies that, they are regularly recruiting members for their groups from various madrassa in Bangladesh.

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