Why Bangladeshi youth are abandoning the guitar for machete
Bangladesh is busy portraying the high profile Holey Artisan Bakery massacre as the handiwork of home-grown machete-wielding terrorists and not those operating at a global level, bringing about death and devastation at the push of a button from afar.
International terror groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS), despite its claims, and al Qaeda, have been vehemently ruled out as having no place in Bangladesh.
The terrorists were home-grown. Period.
But why? Does it in any way make the terror attack in Dhaka, which included the brutal murder of more than 20 people, mostly foreigners, any less serious, to be concealed behind the boundary walls of home and be treated as just a domestic affair?
Does the "involvement" of home-bred militants give a sense of false complacency that they can be handled with a tight slap here and a tight slap there? Or does it give a sense of false hope that the prodigal son can be brought back?
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| A policeman stands guard as a placard is seen at a makeshift memorial near the site, to pay tribute to the victims of the attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. |
Whatever, the reason is, Bangladesh minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, has gone on record to elaorate how the five of the six terrorists were born, brought up and bred in Bangladesh, that their roots - fathers and forefathers - were firmly secured in the nation's soil. In fact, Rohan Imtiyaz, whose father, Imtiyaz Khan, is a member of the ruling Awami League, can be seen as Bangladesh's very own.
If the theory of the home-grown terrorist is accepted, does it not give the country all the more reason to be terrified, to be shaken out of its skin that the school- and college-going boys, between taking tuitions, were educating themselves in radical, destructive philosophy? That instead of strumming tunes of love on the guitar they were picking up machetes and AK22s and turning their motherland into a killing field?
If we accept that the Dhaka attackers were home-grown, it is all the more spine-chilling. Terrorism is no longer the phenomenon of the "other" and terrorists are not creatures of another world, as we have been made to think and believe from our false sense of complacency.
The conventional image of terrorists hiding their faces in long beards, moustaches and head gears, training themselves in madrasahs is passe. The five terrorists of the Dhaka attack belonged to affluent classes and have been to elite private schools and colleges. They drew their succour from techies, and sustenance for their destructive philosophy from the hate speeches of radicalists through the cyber world.
They were like any other boy - obedient, pious and in some cases shy, introvert and generally vulnerable, left to fend for their emotional turmoil and breakdowns during adolescence, with parents too busy with their individual goals and ambitions.
They had gone missing, in fact, had left home in some cases for two-to-six months. But there was no hue and cry in their families, except for the customary routine of registering missing complaints with the police.
Even neighbours were unaware that the familiar, sweet-smiling boy, who would exchange greetings and pleasantries on the way, had disappeared to an unfamiliar world to butcher all that was cordial in him. The number of boys who had gone missing now stands close to 100.
The government is now raising an alarm over the number of children gone missing, after a video released purportedly by the ISIS from Raqqa in Syria warned that attacks such as this will "repeat, repeat and repeat until the rule of Shariat is established throughout the world".
In less than 24 hours, the world was witness to a "repeat", with an explosion in Kishoregunje, not very far from Dhaka.
Ironically, around this time, the Eid namaazis were praying for peace and brotherhood.
The cover-up has led nowhere. The fault lines are all over. Bangladesh and the families of the terrorist boys are under high-power search lights. It's time to accept, to face the truth, howsoever bitter it might be.