Within less than a week of the massacre of innocent civilians in an upscale Gulshan restaurant, terrorists attacked an Eid congregation in Sholakia, Kishoregani on July 7, killing two police officers and a bystander.
The inspector general of police, after visiting the crime scenes, announced that the two attacks were linked and that the perpetrators were all members of the banned militant outfit -- Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).
We now know that the attacker at the Eid gathering was 22-year-old Abir Rahman, who had completed his A-level examinations from a reputed English-medium school in Dhaka and was in the final year of business school at North South University, the country’s biggest privately-owned university.
Abir’s socio-economic background would ordinarily have raised a lot of eyebrows -- children educated in good schools and raised in well-off families are not supposed to grow up to be terrorists, after all.
But the revelations as to the identity of the Holey Artisan Bakery attackers, and rumblings of Bangladeshi militants promising further attacks (and the subsequent revelation of their pre-militancy identities) appear to have challenged conventional wisdom.
Nibras Islam, one of the Gulshan attackers, like Abir, studied at the country’s premier private university. Two other attackers, Mir Samih Mubashir and Rohan Imtiaz, had studied in the country’s best-known English-medium school.
We have to recognise that every terrorist -- be he a member of JMB or ISIS, a student of a Madrasa or an English-medium school -- has a unique story of turmoil and transformation, which needs to be unearthed
The video of Bengali-speaking militants, released within a few days of the Gulshan attack, features three individuals who have all been identified by their colleagues as being educated in top schools and universities.
Common to these terrorists is not only their warped understanding of Islam but also their privileged socio-economic background.
When I first read about the attackers on social media, I couldn’t help but draw parallels with some of the more well-known terrorists of our times. Consider, for instance, the case of the infamous Boston marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who came to the US when they were very young, were educated in said country, and were known to have spoken English without an accent.
Professor Olivier Roy, a leading expert on Islamic politics, notes that the main motivation of the Boston attacks was not religious and that the attackers, far from being religious, were in fact “disconnected” from the Muslim community.
According to Roy, the attackers were “probably loners and slightly suicidal.” They wanted to become heroes and make headlines. They wanted to end in beauty by doing something extraordinary, he argues.
And then, of course, there was Mohamad Bouyeri, murderer of the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh, who has been described by Professor Ian Buruma, of Bard College, in his book Taming the Gods as someone who was born and raised in Amsterdam, not interested in religion, smoked grass, and learned about his purist, brutal version of faith from “websites, mostly in English, catering to the disaffected and resentful in search of a common cause.”
If Bouyeri had been a Russian in the early 20th century, he could have been an anarchist; if he had been a German in the 1970s, he could easily have joined the Red Army faction, Buruma argues.
But as a “Moroccan” in 21st century Holland, he was born again as a holy warrior for an Islamic utopia.
There is no doubt that we can learn important lessons by studying the lives of contemporary terrorists engaged in their so-called “global jihad.” But it is essential that Bangladesh conducts its own studies.
Research groups should be set up by the government to study the lives of the perpetrators of these horrific attacks: What were their family backgrounds, who were their friends, where did they hang out, how did they perform at school, what was their internet browsing history, what sort of books did they read, and ultimately, what motivated them to their ignominious end.
A couple of years back, a research was conducted by Queen Mary University of London, which surveyed over 600 men and women of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Muslim heritage in London and Bradford, aged 18-45. The survey found “youth, wealth, and being in full-time education” to be risk factors “associated with violent radicalisation.”
Of course, these findings are not conclusive. Different socio-economic and political conditions in different countries means that terrorists in their quest for “martyrdom” and “glory” often pursue vastly different career paths.
We need to conduct extensive research to ascertain the local factors and conditions responsible for the radicalisation of a section of the Bangladesh youth. The individual career graph of the terrorist, dead or alive, has to be carefully mapped.
Finally, we have to recognise that we’ve made the mistake of over-generalising for far too long. Our urban elite, which pretends to speak for the entire nation, has long blamed the rise of militancy on the “other” -- the poor, ignorant madrasa student, deprived of a mainstream education, waiting to be brainwashed.
It is now clear that categorisations of potential or actual militants as belonging to a “particular class” or subscribing to a “particular ideology” have been unhelpful and costly.
The growing disenchantment and radicalisation of the country’s technology-savvy generation has been largely ignored.
We have to recognise that every terrorist -- be he a member of JMB or ISIS, a student of a madrasa or an English-medium school -- has a unique story of turmoil and transformation, which needs to be unearthed.
This could be the starting point for ascertaining the root causes of militancy in Bangladesh and in devising appropriate preventive strategies.
Imran Siddiq is a lawyer practising in the Supreme Court of Bangladesh.
