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The Bangladeshi government typically reacts with fury to reports of jihadi camps or fundamentalism within its borders. The reason isn't hard to fathom. In October 2001 two Islamic fundamentalist parties with a history of links to terror groups were elected as part of a four-way electoral alliance led by Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The accession of Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamic Oikya Jote to power in Bangladesh rang alarm bells. Islamic Oikya Jote is open about its sympathies: it is well known for its support of Islamic fundamentalism, the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The party's membership largely duplicates that of the HUJI, which was founded in 1992 by Bangladeshi mujahedin returning from Afghanistan with orders from bin Laden to turn the moderate Islamic state into a nation of true believers. The HUJI has been involved in scores of bombings, including two attempted assassinations of then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in July 2000. And while Jamaat now projects a moderate face, its student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir has been behind a string of bomb attacks and killings. At gatherings during the campaign, Jamaat leaders spoke of breathing the "Islamic spirit of jihad" into the armed forces while supporters rallied around posters of bin Laden and the HUJI slogan: AMRA SOBAI HOBO TALIBAN, BANGLA HOBE AFGHANISTAN. ("We will all be Taliban and Bangladesh will be Afghanistan.")
Jamaat is also the main force behind the phenomenal growth of unlicensed madrasahs, known as qaumi madrasahs, in the past decade. There are now an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 in Bangladesh, of which 30 to 40, run by mujahedin veterans, are known to shelter militants and recruit fresh fighters. Such militants sometimes receive explicit encouragement from Bangladesh's spiritual leaders. Mullah Obaidul Haque, head of the national mosque in Dhaka and a Jamaat associate, told a gathering of thousands in the capital last December: "America and Bush must be destroyed. The Americans will be washed away if Bangladesh's 120 million Muslims spit on them." So controversial were the BNP's partners in government and so infuriating did they find reports of rising fundamentalism that earlier this year Zia twice denied that there were any "Taliban" in her government, or even in Bangladesh. But a Bangladeshi government official tells TIME that while Zia's administration is aware of the fundamentalist threat inside the country, tackling it head-on might trigger a violent backlash. Foreign Minister Morshed Khan took the same line, telling TIME that it was better to have such groups inside the government, looking out.
Al-Qaeda's links to the leadership of Jamaat or Islamic Oikya Jote may be largely rhetorical. But the DGFI, Bangladesh's military intelligence service, may have more to hide. Its agents maintain contact with their counterparts in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and have a long history of supporting rebels fighting Indian rule across the border, including providing safe houses in Dhaka for the leaders of the United Liberation Front for Assam (ULFA). The HUJI source and the portworkers who saw the Mecca arrive claim that the man who greeted the new arrivals was a major in the DGFI. The major checked the visitors in by name and led them to a fleet of suvs lined up on the docks, add the portworkers. A spokesman for the DGFI denied knowing that members of al-Qaeda had ever set foot in Bangladesh. He even denied that the major existed, although diplomatic registration records show the officer is a long-standing member of the service and was stationed in Calcutta in the mid-1990s. The HUJI source and a Bangladeshi military source maintain the major was the last link in an operation that began in Afghanistan. After leaving the Taliban's headquarters in Kandahar as the city fell in early December and crossing into Pakistan, the fugitives traveled to Karachi, hired the Mecca and made the sail around India.
The emergence of al-Qaeda in Dhaka is merely the latest sign that Bangladesh's more radical Islamic groups are coming out from the forests. The former Burmese rebel says three of the camps near Cox's Bazar have closed since Octobernot because of the kind of governmental pressure being applied in Pakistan, but because the militants feel safe enough to transfer their operations to like-minded madrasahs, some of them in the capital. On May 9 and 10, 63 representatives of nine Islamic groupsincluding Rohingya forces, the Islamic Oikya Jote and the ULFAmet in Ukhia to form the Bangladesh Islamic Manch, a united council under HUJI's leadership. So far, the Manch has restricted itself to circulating speeches by bin Laden and Mullah Masood Azhar, a Pakistani militant leader. But it has big plans, says the HUJI source: "The dream is to create a larger Islamic land than the territorial limits of Bangladesh to include Muslim areas of Assam, north Bengal and Burma's Arakan province." That dream, if Islamic terrorists are allowed to continue their operations in Bangladesh, could be a nightmare for the rest of the region.