The Pulse | Security | South Asia

Al-Qaida’s Renewed Confidence in Bangladesh

Its network is growing, albeit slowly. But this is unlikely to manifest in mass casualty attacks.

On August 10, the United Nations Security Council released a report that raised “concern about AQIS [al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent] trying to exploit Bangladesh to establish cells there.”

Although the U.N. report mentioned Bangladesh in only one sentence, it triggered enormous and somewhat surprising media coverage in Bangladesh, with several news publications drawing attention to Muslim radicalism in the country. Police also swung into action. They instructed field-level police to “remain on high alert.”

In recent months, Bangladesh Police have pointed to an upsurge in militant activities in the country. In June 2026, they issued a terror alert, warning of an attack on the Police headquarters. Media reports from last year drew attention to Bangladeshi nationals joining the Tehreek‑e‑Taliban Pakistan (TTP). On August 12, police found a handmade pressure‑cooker bomb in Dhaka’s Savar area.

Bangladesh’s response to militancy has swung between extremes. The Sheikh Hasina regime securitized dissent itself, most visibly when it banned the opposition-aligned Jamaat-e-Islami as a terrorist organization just days before Hasina’s ouster. It used the “Islamist terrorism threat” to marginalize the opposition and crack down on dissent. This served to secure external legitimacy and approval for its dictatorial rule — a dynamic I find paradoxical. In over a decade of experience tracking Muslim radicalization in Bangladesh, I have seen how militancy was manipulated rather than confronted.

In the two years since the ouster of the Hasina regime in August 2024, Bangladesh’s response to militancy has been confused, oscillating between denial — Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed publicly insisted that militancy “no longer exists in the country” — and exaggerated responses, such as the April 2026 police alert warning of an imminent attack on their own headquarters, an attack that never materialized.

Broadly, Bangladesh’s terrorist landscape has comprised three streams: the Taliban inspired Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), the Islamic State-affiliated Neo-JMB, and al-Qaida-linked Ansar Al Islam (AAI). While JMB recruits are largely Qwami madrasa students, Neo-JMB and AAI have drawn their recruits largely from urban educated youths.

There are operational differences as well. While JMB and AAI target secular bloggers and Sufi shrines, Neo-JMB has attacked foreigners, mainly Westerners, describing them as crusaders or Christians.

JMB lost much of its operational capacity after the government executed several of its leaders, including Bangla Bhai and Abdur Rahman, in 2007. However, it remains active, though it continues to be decentralized. Triggers such as a political or religious flashpoint could be used by JMB to justify escalating from recruitment and fundraising alone to actual violence.

Neo‑JMB, meanwhile, lost momentum following the collapse of Islamic State’s caliphate and the killing of Abu Bakr al‑Baghdadi by U.S. forces. ISIS’s pitch to young Bangladeshis was explicitly global: a restored caliphate, an apocalyptic showdown with the “Dajjal” (the Islamic equivalent of the anti-Christ), and a single Qurashi imam (a person who leads prayers in a mosque) commanding the loyalty of the entire ummah (global community of Muslims). When Baghdadi’s caliphate collapsed territorially and he was killed in 2019, that pitch lost its anchor. The promise of a caliphate had been rendered false and it had visibly failed, thereby undermining ISIS’s ideological foundation and contributing to its decline. It had ripple effects; it weakened the Neo-JMB’s........

© The Diplomat