THREAT OF GLOBAL TERRORISM FOR BANGLADESH: A REALITY OR A MYTH

Abstract

In the era of globalization and technological advancement, terrorism has gained
multi-dimensional height, where in terrorist think globally, organized regionally
but act locally. Online radicalization by social media has made the terrorism more
globalized and diversified than ever before. Presently global terrorist outfits
like ISIS, AQ and AQIS are trying to influence the Muslim world including
Asian Region. They are alluring the young people to join their outfits for so
called ‘Jihad’. As a part of the globalized world Bangladesh is not out of the
influence of terrorist’s domain. Bangladesh is suffering from terrorist activities
since independence. It had the leftist dominated terrorism in the early stages
and religion extremism surfaced in the late nineties and thereof. The most
dominated terrorist groups like; HuJI-B, JMB, JMJB, HT, ABT and Nabba JMB
are active in the country in different magnitude in different phases. Recently
terrorist activities and dimension has been changed and they carried out massive
operations in Holy Artison Bakery at Gulshan and Eid Congregation at Sholakia,
Kishoregonj. They killed two foreigners in 2015 and seventeen foreigners in Holy
Artison Bakery on 01 July 2016. These killing were claimed by IS through SITE
Intelligence Group. This has given the birth of the doubt about the threat of
global terrorism in Bangladesh. In this backdrop the research has been carried to
examine whether there exists any real threat of global terrorism on Bangladesh.
Bangladesh government has given highest priority and declared ‘Zero Tolerance’
policy to address the issue. Lot of domestic, regional, international and bi-lateral
cooperation and measures are being taken to curb the terrorism in Bangladesh.
With the present efforts, Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in controlling
terrorism in the country. Therefore, available data from the research indicates that
terrorism has always been an internal affair of Bangladesh and it has hardly any
relation with the transnational terrorist outfits. However, Bangladesh being the
third Muslim largest country having huge young population remains susceptible
to global terrorism in future and terrorist organizations might pursue to exploit
any opportunity to radicalize young people and homegrown terrorist outfits to
join their organizations.