Iran's President Hassan Rouhani remained defiant after the US re-imposed sanctions on Iran. In a nationally televised address, the president said the Islamic republic will “proudly bypass the sanctions.” PHOTO: AFP

By Syed Mansur Hashim
Nov 6 2018 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

Last month, a flotilla of ships carrying more than 20 million barrels of Iranian oil headed off to China’s north-eastern Dalian port in a bid to stave off the impending US sanctions that just came into effect on November 4. According to Russian media, the Iranians were quite confident that the country would be able to sell its oil bypassing the latest round of sanctions. Obviously, a deal has been reached with China because the port of Dalian typically saw shipments of oil between 3 and 4 million barrels a day. So, a jump of this magnitude can only mean one thing.

Despite much bluster, things have not gone exactly the way the US had envisaged. Increasingly, more and more nations have called US’s bluff on its threat that individuals and institutions in foreign countries would be penalised if they broke the Iran oil sanctions. This is reflected in the dampening of international prices of crude oil when the US stance was softened by waivers that allow for major players like China, India, Japan and some other countries to buy Iranian crude. We now know that the US administration has stated that it will “temporarily” allow eight importers to keep on buying Iranian oil. The top importers for Iranian oil have been China, India, South Korea, Turkey, Italy, the United Arab Emirates and Japan. India has already stated that its policy on oil import is not going to change. The fact that the US has already softened its stance is hardly a major “success” for that country’s foreign policy.

Senior members of the US administration have been stung by fellow party members for the lacklustre nature of sanctions against Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been under pressure from some Republican senators to take a harder line against Iran. Indeed, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has apparently hinted that institutions and individuals that use SWIFT, the financial messaging service to do business with Iranian entities, could face repercussions. This could perhaps explain why India and Iran are finalising steps that would allow New Delhi to pay for oil imports in Indian rupees (INR). From what has been reported in The Times of India, India is taking steps to make payments via an account in UCO bank (in India), which has no international exposure and is not connected to SWIFT. According to that report, 45 percent of Indian oil payments were made in INR from the UCO account and 55 percent paid in euros. Given the threat of US sanctions that have just taken hold, the new arrangement could mean that the entire payment will now be made in INR.

Now, where does that leave US foreign policy? Beyond statements by the Secretary of State like “we strongly encourage those nations to ensure that Iran spends that money on humanitarian purchases to benefit the Iranian people,” what can the administration do to stop other nations from doing business with Iran? Some of its staunchest allies, like South Korea, have received waivers (according to Bloomberg and Reuters) to continue to import Iranian oil, which means it is pretty much business-as-usual because with China, Japan and India exempted, these sanctions are not all that serious but in an election year, it makes the administration look good that it’s doing something to contain the so-called Iranian threat.

Mr Pompeo has released a list of 12 demands that Iran must comply with if it wants the sanctions lifted. These are: stopping “support for terrorism,” withdrawing from the Syrian conflict, halting all nuclear and ballistic missile development, etc. There is zero possibility of Iran withdrawing from the Syrian conflict without a comprehensive peace treaty coming into effect (that will be overseen by the big powers). Iran has invested much in the Syrian conflict and this goes far beyond man and material. This conflict is what propelled Iran into a rising regional power and it will take more than sanctions to change Iranian foreign policy.

In fact, Iran has been living with one form of sanction or another for decades now and the only thing these sanctions have achieved is driving millions of people into poverty. Iranians are a proud people. The country fought a bitter war with Iraq for about a decade, suffered a great deal and continued to suffer under sanctions brought against it over the years. Things are not going to change because of the latest round of sanctions because today, Iran has a lot more friends than it did yesterday. Friends who are going to circumvent policies that are meant to limit the presence of Iranian oil in the international market.

Syed Mansur Hashim is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs are thought to be responsible for contributing to 0.5 Celsius warming of the climate. On October 14, 170 countries came together in Kigali, Rwanda to sign an amendment to the Montreal protocol treaty that will commit nations to eliminate 90 percent HFCs with phasing out work slated to begin in 2019. HFCs are used in air-conditioning, refrigeration and aerosols and its usage has been rapidly increasing (at about 10 percent annually) as income levels spurred in Asian countries like China and India with expanding middle classes; the mass scale adoption of air conditioning in homes, commercial buildings and cars was inevitable. The downside to HFCs is that it is considered to be much more destructive to the climate than carbon dioxide.

HFC gases are widely used in air conditioning units, www.cwcs.couk

The reason perhaps why it took so long for developing nations to come to the negotiating table was that companies making air conditioning equipment in their countries still relied on old technology and a ratified treaty would require substantial investment to upgrade both factories and equipment. The age old argument remains that climate change is primarily caused by advanced economies and the penalty being posed on developing nations is unfair. Unfortunately, climate change is a global problem and we all need to do our bit to stem global warming. But the good news is that countries such as China will get a little more time and our time for phasing out HFCs begins in 2028, while for Europe, Japan and the United States (US) it starts in 2019.

The agreement includes provisions for hot countries to reduce their use of HFCs at a slower rate. Developed countries will start to reduce the use of HFCs by 2019, while developing nations have been given a longer time frame in which to freeze their use of the damaging gases. The roadmap points to richer economies like that of the US, Europe and Japan start limiting their use of HFCs within a few years and make a cut of at least 10 percent from 2019. Developing countries like China, Latin American countries and island states will put a cap on use of HFCs from 2024. Other countries including India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the Gulf States will not freeze their use until 2028. China remains the largest producer of HFCs and getting it onboard the deal was of paramount importance.

According to Durwood Zaelke of the Institute for Government and Sustainable Development (IGSD) “Absolutely it’s a historic day. We came to get a half a degree of warming out of the system and we are going to walk away with about 90 percent from the Kigali amendment”. The sentiment is echoed by Christian Aid’s Senior Policy Advisor, Benson Ireri who stated “HFCs posed an immediate threat to a safe climate due to their increasing use and high global warming potential, thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide”.

While the deal is being hailed as a great success, implementation remains a major issue. If implemented fully, experts calculate that it will remove the equivalent of 70 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2050. The challenge will be to find monies for research and development of viable albeit environment-friendly alternatives to HFCs. Current research points to substances that do not deplete the ozone layer and have minimal impact on the climate, e.g. ammonia. According to experts, super-efficient, cost effective cooling technologies are in the development phase that can help protect the environment by reducing HFC emissions that are also energy efficient. Given that worldwide use of refrigerators, air conditioners, aerosol spray use is increasing at a rate of 10 percent annually, it was imperative that the Kigali deal be signed by participants with realistic timeframes. Any change of this magnitude will require billions of dollars in new technologies to re-equip manufacturers. This issue will be discussed in the next Meeting of Parties in Montreal in 2017.

The writer is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Five years into the ‘oust Assad’ campaign, Turkey finds itself isolated in the region and beyond. After a narrow escape from a failed coup attempt, President Erdogan may finally be rethinking his Syria policy. Because the arming of rebels that included hard-line Islamists has not only contributed to the killing of some 280,000 innocents, it also brought upon Turkey the problem of millions of cross-border refugees and failed to put a dent against the Kurdish Workers’ Party, i.e. PKK. The overly ambitious foreign policy of the Turkish government where Erdogan found himself at odds with Egypt, Libya and of course Syria, has done little to raise his profile in the region. That the Syrian engagement is a foolhardy experiment where the rebels cannot bring down Assad is now all the more evident with Russia’s entry into the conflict.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Photo: afp

The most important change is related to Syria. That Assad has the unwavering support of both Russia and Iran is an established fact. Both nations have committed man-and-material that not only ensures the survival of the regime but forged alliances with the Kurds to take the fight to the Islamic State (IS). To think about a 180 degree shift in policy is unthinkable for Turkey. Yet to continue the proxy war is already proving too costly and given Ankara’s increased isolation amongst its allies in NATO, particularly the US and European Union, the time for eating some “humble pie” is already being played out (Erdogan has apologised to Russia in a letter of regret of the shooting down of the jet incident in 2015). The Turkish government has come down from its high horse and sought rapprochement with Israel. And indeed, going by what has been reported in international press of late “Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, was quoted by RIA, the Russian news agency, as saying Ankara and Moscow should work together for a political solution on Syria after meeting Servei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart” in late July.

The time for rapprochement has gained momentum as Ankara comes to terms with a suicide bombing that took 43 lives in Istanbul’s main international airport. That IS was blamed for the attack merely goes to show the futility of funding and arming Sunni rebel groups (some with seriously dubious jihadi credentials) has come back to haunt Turkey today. Years of hawkish foreign policy has landed Turkey with broken alliances, a loss of trade and worse of all, allowing militants and insurgents to attack Turkish soil with impunity. Today, Turkey too is suffering the full brunt of extremism, some of which can be attributed to Ankara’s flawed interventionist policy in Syria. For, Turkey has much bigger problems on its hand than the removal of Assad. It wishes to see a weakening of Kurds and marginalisation of IS, but for that to happen Erdogan will require Putin’s assistance – and the only way that can happen is if Turkey moves away from its regime-change policy in Syria. As pointed out earlier, Turkey has begun a reshuffle and is relieving some officials that head the Syria campaign. Reports have emerged that Ankara recently sacked its intelligence official responsible for Syria – the move sends the signal that perhaps there will be a shift in Turkey’s hard-line position on Assad’s removal.

The diplomatic flurry is happening behind the scenes and Algeria has been active in trying to diffuse the situation between Syria and Turkey. A normalisation of relations is not even on the cards at this point; what is on the cards is to find some middle ground whereby Turkey moves away from its staunch position of a Syria minus Assad situation. The Syrian adventure has actually helped Kurdish separatists to re-emerge in mainstream Turkish politics as a potent political and military force and Turks have been trying for decades to push the Kurdish question to the sidelines. Hence, for Turkey and its national and regional interests, there needs to be some form of dialogue that will help Erdogan to disengage from the region without losing face.

The Syrian conflict has gone on for long enough. Too much blood has been spilled and has drawn in too many foreign powers into the quagmire. It is time for military disengagement and political dialogue between nations and not combatants. Only when there is peace in Syria can there truly be regional stability. Yes, atrocities have been committed on a massive scale on both sides and although human rights organisations will not be happy, the alternative to a negotiated settlement involving Syria, Turkey and other powers is to effectively prolong a war that has already descended into a war of attrition with no clear winner.

The writer is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The world is at war with extremists. Developed and developing nations, whether it is France, the United States, Russia or China, the Middle East or countries in the sub-continent, we are all battling one form of Muslim militancy or another. And while alliances are being forged on a regional or trans-continental basis to fight outfits like the Boko Haram, Al Qaeda or the Islamic State (IS), and battles are being fought out on land in Iraq Syria, Libya or Yemen, on the streets of Paris or in Dhaka, every nation that has faced the onslaught of extremists who are connected to a global network of jihadists that is increasingly sophisticated, the realisation that they are now battling for the ‘hearts and minds’ of the populace is emerging.

The extremists’ distortion of religion and their success in disseminating information has policymakers the world over going back to the drawing board and reassessing the threat – not just in military terms, but also incorporating a new strategy that makes use of media activity, to new school curricula, to effectively counter jihadist propaganda. It is the realisation that this is an ideological battle and the war must be fought on two fronts, both militarily and undermining extremist ideology that will put a dent in their recruitment efforts.

Taking the actual message of Islam to the schooling system is one approach being tried out in some countries. It is now obvious that if young Muslims are to be stopped being turned by jihadists, something has to be done about teachings and preaching in mosques, seminaries and educational institutions. The use of religious text that prove that arguments put forth by extremists that mass killings are condoned by the Qur’an is false, that Islamists are toying with young impressionable minds – is essentially at the forefront of this new effort. Unless hard-line teachings can be countered, the “war on terror” will be a losing battle.

Adam Garfinkle of the Foreign Policy Research Institute put all this into context: “we face not an esoteric intellectual but a full-fledged sociological problem in the greater Middle East…The larger and deeper social context, which feeds off collective emotion rather than the tracts of Sayiid Qutb or the tape-recorded rants of Osama bin-Laden, explains why newly vogue US counter-messaging efforts are a waste of time and money. Those efforts are bound to fail because those messages are…disembodied from the social networks in which ideas are embedded and give life. The notion that a bunch of people on the fifth floor of the State Department are one fine day going to discover the perfect set of words placed in perfect order and translated perfectly into Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto and so on – and that set before fanatics these words are going to suddenly change their entire point of view – is a rationalist fantasy.”

One approach that has worked to counter gang violence in developed countries is now being tailor made to go counterterrorism in developing countries. Tailor-made in the sense that experts take into account local conditions, but the success of such approaches largely depend on the willingness of local stakeholders that include the respective governments to cooperate to change their corrupt and abusive behaviour. The idea that criminal gangs and terrorist outfits possess similarities in outlooks based on socioeconomic conditions is giving criminologists ideas to come up with programmes that may be implemented in various countries to counter the philosophies espoused by militants. Some basic elements are the same. The feeling of hopelessness in the face of police brutality, the need to belong to a club or a congregation of people who face similar identity crisis, the overwhelming hatred for the ‘establishment’, the need to feel powerful, proactive and invincible, etc. The counter-messaging efforts that are emerging differ from region to region.

For any effort to succeed, the respective governments must be open to ideas. The United States State Department has tried to find common ground with Bangladesh police to introduce ‘community policing’ that would help devise a strategy based on police-civilian partnerships. That initiative never went anywhere because local conditions and culture were not factored in. A country where the larger populace is in fact alienated from the police due to a myriad of reasons, and also corruption amongst certain elements of the citizenry provided the grounds for failure. No solution can be imposed from the outside. What works in El Salvador will probably not work in Bangladesh and vice versa.

What will work of course is bringing on board the religious leadership of the country who control the mosques and religious schools and the Islamic scholars to work with authorities. This will only work if the vast majority of the religious opinion leaders are convinced that it is time to forge a partnership with the State to counter a force that threatens their way of life too and not just that of the State’s. The State for its part has to step back from wholesale suppression of any dissent which is giving rise to much of the anger that is being utilised by jihadists to reach their own end goals. At the end of the day, we have to realise that ideas must be fought with ideas. No amount of policing and counterterrorism will root out militancy. Only when the State takes into confidence the people can there be any meaningful resistance to the spread of ideals (no matter how distorted) amongst the youth – illiterate or otherwise.

The writer is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

We have been attacked as never before. The facts do not need to be repeated. The savagery with which 20 hostages were slaughtered need not be retold. Islamic terrorism has arrived in Bangladesh with a bang and it has shaken us to our foundations. The relative peace we lived in while the world around us disintegrated in the face of onslaught by extremist outfits such as the Islamic State (IS) and Al Qaeda and other similar outfits across the length and breadth of all continents is now not news anymore, merely a fact of life.

What took many of us by surprise is that three of the dead terrorists turned out to be students of elite English medium educational institutions like North South University and Scholastica School (as identified by friends when pictures were released on social media). This blows apart our perception that the marauding hounds of hell who constitute Jihadi outfits in Bangladesh are all, essentially, products of madrasas. So, why on earth would the children of well-to-do parents end up wielding automatic weapons and other weaponry be on a suicide mission? What has happened in Dhaka is big news for us, but it is hardly news. The world has been witnessing young people of similar backgrounds from Europe signing up to fight the Jihadi fight in Syria and Iraq under the banner of the IS.

Things did not come to this state in a day. Although this article is not a lesson in history, we do have to look to the past in an effort to try and understand why bright young men decide to throw away their lives in the false belief that it is alright to take the blood of innocents to gain martyrdom. Every major religion has its zenith and its decline. Islam had its heyday. Hegel defined the rise of Islam as the revolution of the east. Following a few centuries of unparalleled growth that allowed space for rational debates that ushered in a glorious civilisation, rich in science and the arts, the Muslim world witnessed the creeping in of rigid orthodoxy by the 12th century. With strict indoctrination crept in corruption, ignorance and inept governance. The decay was many centuries in the making but by the time Europe entered into the industrial revolution in the 18th century; the Muslim world had fallen far behind.

Unable to match the West in terms of technology and challenged intellectually, it was impossible to stop the flow of ideas from an alien world that ushered in liberal thoughts that threatened the orthodoxy from which the Muslim world could not recover. New fangled ideas in the guise of nationalism and socialism attacked and overturned the set order of things in the Muslim heartland of the Middle East. Westernisation was inevitable and it ripped apart the spiritual and the cultural identity of the Muslim world as the young rose to challenge the old. Colonialism in its many manifestations threatened to engulf and perish the Islamic Order that had recoiled from learning from other civilisations and was stuck in the past. Modernism was frowned upon but could not be stopped. Nation States were carved out of the old Order by colonial powers and Muslims were relegated to second grade citizens in a world where they had wielded considerable influence and prestige.

In the midst of this onslaught orthodox Islam spread its wings in the form of “exporting” madrassas globally which taught young men a strict version that was known as the Wahabi school of thought. The world came to know of this when the United States and its allies sought to contain its erstwhile cold war adversary, the Soviet Union when it invaded Afghanistan. The Mujahideen were recruited from the madrasas in neighbouring Pakistan and fighters adhering to radical schools of thought globally flocked to the training camps to form an army to fight the “infidel” Soviets.The unpublished piece ‘Understanding Radical Islam’ by Ali Ahmed Ziauddin delves deeper into the issue.

With the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Afghan campaign, the world was left with thousands of battle-hardened fanatics with no war to fight. But there is always a war to fight and that came when Saddam was toppled and Iraq disintegrated into a battleground where the Sunnis lost overnight their right to rule. Saddam’s army was disbanded and thousands of former soldiers found that they had lost their purpose. The Sunni populace lost their homeland and were relegated to second class citizens by Baghdad where Shiites ruled supreme – and their country which they believed was theirs to rule turned into a wasteland. Reaction was inevitable. Insurgency crept in, as did radicalisation. Former officers merged with guerrillas from the Afghan campaign and beyond, birds of different feathers united in their common goal – fighting under a banner that promised death to “infidels” and the resurgence and re-emergence of Sunni dominance.

Post-invasion Iraq is the place where modern day radical Islam found a breeding ground for growth. A once proud nation that had been humiliated to the point that mass despair set in; millions unemployed and thousands dead – it provided the perfect setting for extremists to plan, organise, recruit and execute a long campaign that would give birth to outfits like the IS. A global Jihadi movement was born that would draw in the disaffected and the disenfranchised in their thousands, not just the madrasa students but the sons and daughters of the elite, educated in the best institutions, but radicalised by their perception of being relegated to 2nd class citizens for being Muslims – by the West.

One question that is not often asked is why distorted interpretation of Islam is able to draw in people from different backgrounds, with varying educational qualification. The answer simply is this: Islam in principle, allows for inclusivity. That is why over 14 centuries, Islam has spread to all continents and why today a Bangladeshi and an American Muslim can relate to each other on the basis of faith. The seeds of today’s scourge whether it is the IS or one of the several local extremist movements that exist in our country were laid by the West in the camps of Pakistan many decades ago. The use of Islamic zealots to fight their wars have now come back to haunt us all. Today thousands are perishing the world over for bad political decisions.

So what do now? We have chosen to ignore the warning signs despite repeated killings by such elements over the last year or so. Free thinkers, members of minority communities and other sects have been killed with impunity – all the while the State claiming that we are insulated from these forces. We have heard talk about uniting to defeat these forces of darkness who kill and maim in the name of religion. That is tall talk where political dissent has been effectively quashed to the point of extinction and the vacuum created has been filled up by Islamic radicals. These elements are drawing their “soldiers” from the disenfranchised, the millions of unemployed, but they are also drawing them from the elite – because at the end of the day, the success of IS in holding territory and fighting it out with global powers and surviving, sends a very powerful message, however distorted, to millions of young Muslims worldwide that there is a ‘fight’ worth fighting for.

In Bangladesh, we have to wake up to these realities. As radicals join a pan Islamic movement to propagate global jihad, there is a counterbalance to that in the form of other nations that have fought the scourge for decades. These countries have developed counterterrorism techniques and outfits that have tackled radical outfits which cannot be tackled by conventional law enforcement. When will we get our heads out of the sand and admit we have a problem and we need help from friendly nations?

The writer is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Photo: snopes.com

By Syed Mansur Hashim
Jun 21 2016 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

Thanks to Edward Snowden dumping sensitive data on to the net, there now exists more accurate estimates on foreign fighters recruited by the Islamic State (IS). Indeed, going by The Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point (United States Military Academy) recently made available a report titled ‘The Caliphate’s Global Workforce: An Inside Look at the Islamic State’s Foreign Fighter Paper Trail’ which provides data of some 4,600 foreign fighters recruited between early 2013 and 2014. This study which is a compilation of 4018 Mujahid Data forms, 2 Excel files (with 155 individuals entered), Exit records (31 files, 431 individuals) and 15 miscellaneous files provide a pattern of recruitment, which interestingly points to something rather disturbing, i.e. Europeans are signing up in alarming numbers, mostly from smaller countries like Belgium and Denmark. We are talking continental Europe here and the IS has successfully recruited from East and West and the Balkans.

What has become clear from the data presented is that the IS recruits from over 70 countries and that means the global workforce IS commands brings with them different skills and capabilities. The educational backgrounds of foreign fighters vary widely and the group has benefitted enormously as most of the fighters have received higher education. This means that the group is actively “head hunting” for more than fighters, it is recruiting “individuals with specific educational, professional, or military backgrounds that might prove useful to the group in the future.” The average age of the foreign fighter is 26-27, but what should be noted here is that IS does not recruit based on age, rather on specific skills sets that these foreign citizens bring to the group. As pointed out in the report, information on 12 individuals born in the ’50s (two apparently are French citizens) “demonstrated relatively significant professional experience, to include multiple engineers, teachers, business owner, and a government employee (from Saudi Arabia).

All this points to IS’s efforts to recruit more than suicide bombers. We are looking at a divergent group of people who have skills linked to governance, business aptitude and technical knowhow. The IS has recruited heavily amongst people with IT background, especially those having media and communications background, which include amongst others, having knowledge in computer design and engineering, networks, programming, telecommunications, and website design. This would explain the savvy propaganda material coming out of the IS social media factory that make even the most gruesome acts of terror appealing or horrifying depending on the audience.

The IS has “facilitators” who travel widely to recruit. The data presented provides the name of top five border facilitators, viz. Abu-Muhammad al-Shimali who facilitated some 31 percent of all foreign fighter recruits (1,306) and the other four Abu-al-Bara’ al Shimali, Abu-Mansur al-Maghribi, Abu-Ilyas al-Maghribi and Abu-‘Ali-al-Turki combined recruiting some 637 fighters. The US government has offered a US$5 million reward for al-Shimali who has been identified as the IS’s Border Chief and following the Paris attacks is now chief accused for helping those who carried out the Paris operation to travel to France. Although IS allows for recruits to select their area of preference (suicide, frontline fighter), a mere 12 percent opted for suicide missions and that can perhaps be attributed to the fact that today, IS commands significant territory. By looking at these patterns, it would appear that the Islamic State is looking into the future where the “caliphate” that can successfully be governed. Hence, the shift is away from one-way missions (suicide bomber) to a combat role that allows for greater survivability.

So where does that leave countries at the receiving end of IS’s actions? IS has emerged as the first truly multi-national Islamic militant organisation that can and does strike across continents, many European countries are finding out the hard way that their counter-terrorism efforts are sorely lacking. In the aftermath of the Belgian bombings in March, it took authorities four months to locate Salah Abdeslam in the neighbourhood he grew up in. Belgium’s plight in combating terrorism is not unique. These nations have never faced anything as deadly as the IS which has successfully recruited fighters with prior combat experience, fighters who blend in with the local populace who are well educated and sophisticated in outward appearance.

As government agencies go back to the drawing board, whether in Europe or Asia, the message is clear. There has to be cooperation among agencies and countries. The IS apparently has mobilised some 400 operatives on the European continent. We have little idea of its operations in the Indian subcontinent. And there lies the danger. Bangladesh has been witness to rising militancy problems. Although we are informed there is no IS presence in Bangladesh and the killings have been carried out by our own home-grown outfits, what we should remember is that IS in all respects is the world’s first truly global jihadist movement with recruits from 70 nations. There is no room for complacency when it comes to our national security and it would be ill advised to sit back and relax.

The writer is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh