Jihad in Bangladesh: Profiling Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami’s Maulana Shaykh Farid
Jihad in Bangladesh: Profiling Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami’s Maulana Shaykh Farid
Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) forces, the country’s elite anti-terror police, achieved a much awaited breakthrough barely within a week’s time in late April this year, when they apprehended three of the most wanted terror masterminds from different areas of the Dhaka Division. The RAB’s target was Shawkat Osman (a.k.a. Shaykh Mohammad Farid), the leader of the banned terrorist organization Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami Bangladesh (HuJI). Farid, also known as Rahamutullah, was arrested near Tongi Railway Station in Gazipur district on April 26 (Samkal [Dhaka], April 27). A day earlier, RAB personnel arrested two other top HuJI operatives called Mohammad Abdul Hannan Sabbir and Ainul Haque from a hideout in Keraniganj area of the Dhaka (Daily Star [Dhaka], April 25).
Farid, along with the other two arrested leaders, is accused of masterminding a number of bomb attacks and assassination plots across the country that include the March 1999 bomb attack at the cultural program of Udichi Shilpi Goshthi in Jessore, an assassination attempt on then Prime Minister and Awami League leader Shaykh Hasina in July 2000 at Kotalipara in Gopalganj, a bomb attack on a Communist Party of Bangladesh rally at Paltan Maidan in January 2001 and a high-casualty bomb attack on a Bangla New Year (Pahela Baishakh) celebration at Ramna Batamul in April 2001.
Following the August 2004 attacks on the Awami League rally, Farid reportedly fled to neighboring Burma along with Maulana Sabbir and Maulana Yahiya, and took shelter for a short time in the Chhoto Pahar and Kala Pahar areas located in Burma’s Arakan State that border Bangladesh’s Chittgong Division (BDNews24.com, April 27).
HUJI-Bangladesh and the Elusive Shaykh Farid
Originally a Pakistan-based jihadi group, Harakat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (Movement of Islamic Holy War) was founded in the early 1980s. HuJI’s Bangladesh franchise, often tagged as HuJI-BD, founded by the members of the 1984 all Bangldeshi ‘volunteer mujahideen corps’ who took part in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. HuJi-BD made its first public appearance in late April 1992 through a press conference and a public rally in Dhaka, celebrating the end of the Marxist regime in Afghanistan. [1]
Sometimes noted as the ‘Bengali Taliban,’ HuJI-Bangladesh is inspired by and follows the hard-line Islamist ideology of the Afghan Taliban. HuJI-Bangladesh was funded early on by the late Osama bin Laden to launch a holy war that was to unite the disparate territories of the Muslim world (Ummah) in the early 1990s. Broadly, HuJI’s aim was to establish a radical Islamic state using both political process and terror in Bangladesh. The most infamous slogan to this effect has been “Amra Sobai Hobo Taliban, Bangla Hobe Afghanistan”(we all become Taliban, and Bangladesh will turn to Afghanistan). [2] This line of thought belies the history of Bangladesh as a secular, multi-religious state with its large Hindu minority since its inception in 1971.
HuJI-BD shared the operational space along with other like-minded homegrown terror groups such as Jammatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). With training camps in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) and near Coxs Bazar, HuJI extended its reach into the neighboring Burma to try to co-opt the Rohingya Solidarity Organization, a Burmese Muslim insurgency that first entered Bangladesh after a 1991 pogrom carried out by Yangon (Asia Times Online, September 21, 2002). HuJI suffered infighting in the late 1990s that led to Shaykh Farid’s ascent to the higher echelon within the organization.
Shaykh Farid, 47, the fifth son of Shaykh Akram Hosain of Kazdia village (Khulna District), received his education in Chittagong’s Darul Uloom Muinul Islam (Hathazari) and Jamiatul Uloom Al-Islamia (Lalkhan Bazar) madrassas (Daily Sangarm, April 28). After completion of study, he was briefly employed as a teacher in Mirpur’s Darul Koran madrasa (Jaijaidin [Dhaka], May 6). Since 1996, Islamic madrassas including Lalbagh madrassa of Dhaka, Rehmanaia Madrassa, Muhammad pur Jamia madrassa, Malibagh madrassa and Jatarpur madrassas have turned out to be hotbeds of HuJI activity under Farid’s leadership. He himself underwent training in Cox’s Bazaar’s Ukhia Mariccha madrasa to participate in the Afghan war from 1987-88. By 1992, Farid along with Abdul Kuddus, Moulana Noor Muhammad and Mufti Mir Ahmed Bari trained recruits to fight in Burma in a camp near the southern city of Cox’s Bazar (Tripura Info [Agartala] April 28).
Shaykh Farid, one of HuJI’s core founders, became the Organizing Secretary of HuJI in 1997. Since then Farid has been leading HuJI at various times in various positions such as ‘general secretary’ and subsequently ‘Amir’ (Chief) of Dhaka and Chittagong district units (BDNews24.com, April 27). He reportedly went underground following the decision of Shaykh Hasina’s Awami League government to reopen and investigate many terror cases, which resulted in arrests of many founding leaders including Abdus Salam, Mufti Abdul Hanan and Maulana Shafiqul Islam. Sensing trouble, Farid ordered his fellow operatives not to divulge his whereabouts in the country and went into hiding in the CHT region for some time. At the time of his arrest, Shaykh Farid had been living under the guise of a nondescript fruit farmer with the pseudonym ‘Abdur Rashid’ in a remote area outside Cox’s Bazar for the past few years. [3]
Tryst with Politics
Shaykh Farid, who is the brother of Mufti Shakhawat Hossain, Member Secretary of Islami Oikyo Jote (IOJ) in Khulna City, has strong political connections, which have manifested in recent years. With strong ties to pro-Islamist political parties such as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and with many leaders of IOJ, an Islamist political conglomerate, [4] Farid has nourished the ambition of a floating independent political party in Bangladesh. Presently RAB is probing into Farid’s link with IOJ chairman Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini with whom Farid met several times in Lalkhan Madrasa (Jaijaidin [Dhaka], May 6).
Recent investigations show that Farid was involved in a larger political conspiracy with former BNP state minister for Home Affairs Lutfozzaman Babar, former deputy minister Abdus Salam Pintu, and two former director generals of the National Security Intelligence (NSI), Major General Rezzaqul Haider Chowdhury and Brigadier General M. Abdur Rahim. Farid’s dalliances with these state actors are believed to have led to the deadly grenade attacks on the BNP’s bitter rival, the Awami League, at a rally in August 2004 (The New Age [Dhaka], July 3).
Shaykh Farid was instrumental in forming the Islamic Democratic Party (IDP) in May 2007 along with senior HuJI operatives Abdus Salam and Kazi Azizul Huq. He served as secretary of the party, which somewhat legitimized HuJI’s activities. The Election Commission of Bangladesh eventually rejected the IDP’s registration application in November 2008 (Daily Star [Dhaka], November 2, 2008). The IDP had two stated goals: “to run the country as per the Charter of Medina, which gives equal rights to all citizens irrespective of religion and ethnicity, and to introduce Shari’a law for Muslims of Bangladesh” (The New Age [Dhaka], October 21, 2008). Attempting to gain legitimacy as a mainstream political party, IDP leaders distanced themselves from the past violent acts perpetrated by the HuJI, saying that all of those acts were perpetrated by more violent splinter groups led by Mufti Abdul Hannan and Abdur Rouf. This statement seemed to prove the rumored differences between Hannan and Shaykh Farid that had festered since 1998 and their disagreement over the control of HuJI and quibbling within the HuJI rank and file (Daily Star [Dhaka], September 29, 2008).
Prior to the forming of the IDP, Shaykh Farid, along with top HuJI operatives, carried out overt political and charitable activities with a tacit understanding with the then ruling BNP’s coalition government, which was more sympathetic to Bangladesh’s Islamists, as a possible wedge against the Awami league. His endeavor to bring HuJI into the political mainstream dated back to the period after the bomb attack on a cultural function at Udichi in March 1999. During this time, Farid reportedly changed the name of HuJi to Islami Dawat-e-Kafela to avoid scrutiny by Bangladeshi authorities. In 2004, Farid played a vital role in morphing HuJi into Islami Gan Andolon Bangladesh (IGA-B). Following the government’s proscription on HuJI in October 2005, Farid dropped Bangladesh from the name in 2006 leaving it as IGA (Probe News Magazine [Dhaka], April 2007). Then HuJI’s top leaders, including Farid, met under a new banner of Sachetan Islami Janata (Conscious Islamic People) near the Baitul Mukarram National Mosque on August 16, 2006 (Daily Star [Dhaka], August 23, 2006).
To expand its overt initiatives, HuJI under the shadow of Shaykh Farid, even managed to establish a registered charity called Faruqi Welfare Foundation (FWF) in June 2008. The purpose of FWF was purportedly to open up a legitimate channel to bring foreign funds for its madrassa networks and possibly for building recruitment grounds for new members (Daily Star [Dhaka], July 19, 2009). The other charity linked with HuJI’s was al-Markazul Islami Bangladesh, whose vice-chairman Maulana Abdur Rashid was detained in 2011 after Farid’s confession to his ties in connection with August 2004 grenade attack (Daily Sun [Dhaka], May 10).
An Afghan Link
Shaykh Farid disclosed to his interrogators that he met the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani in 1999. More significantly, he also claimed to have met with the late al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden while visiting Afghanistan and Pakistan. (Dainik Janakantha, April 29). The HuJI faction that Farid has been heading is comprised of Afghan war veterans that fought alongside the late Taliban commander Dadullah Akhund (a.k.a. Mullah Dadullah). When Dadullah was killed in 2007, leaders of IGA mourned his death publicly in Bangladesh.
Following the arrest of Abdul Hannan and other HuJI leaders, Farid is believed to have reorganized the group under different banners, comprised mostly of returned Afghan war veterans. [5] During these various shuffles, he recruited new members through HuJI’s district units and from madrassas across Bangladesh. Some 475 Afghan war veterans joined the IDP, according to media reports (Daily Star [Dhaka], September 14, 2008). He also maintained close ties and regular contact with leaders of Pakistan and Burmese chapters of HuJI.
Funding Network
Shaykh Farid’s ties with Bangladesh-born UK citizen Golam Mostofa, the UK unit chief of HuJI came to surface in April 2010 when Mostafa was arrested in Sylhet Division (The Daily Star [Dhaka], April 16, 2010). It is suspected that Golam had remitted large amounts of cash to both HuJI and JMB militants in Bangladesh. Under the supervision of Farid, HujI reportedly received financial aid from thousands of Bangladeshi migrant workers in the Persian Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (BDNews24.com, April 27). Farid disclosed that the Karachi-based Rashid Trust – a known jihadi financial conduit – has funded HuJi at different times, specifically with respect to sponsoring HuJI men to join war in Afghanistan (Dainik Janakantha, May 3).
Conclusion
It was believed that the inner power struggle within HuJI led to the recent arrests of Shaykh Farid and other top militants of HuJI. [6] The existing conflict between Shaykh Muhammad Farid who, until very recently, had thus far managed to evade arrest, and the more radical Mufti Abdul Hannan, led to the exposing of Farid’s cover. Farid is now in the hands of an Awami League-led government hostile to violent Islamism and which seeks to mend fences in the region. A trained militant who can operate anti-aircraft weapons, tanks and other sophisticated arms with ease, Farid warned during his interrogation that if his party, the IDP, is not accepted as a legal political party, HuJI cadres would continue their attempts at destabilizing the country.
Shaykh Farid’s arrest, as one of the key figures advocating for global jihad in Bangladesh, is considered to be a crucial catch for investigating agencies in that country. Farid’s capture is useful primarily for unraveling many mysteries behind HuJI’s overt political agenda, funding networks and various subversive activities inside Bangladesh and in neighboring India and Burma where HujI has expanded substantially in recent years.
Notes
1. Ali Riaz, Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh: A Complex Web, (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 82.
2. Hiranmay Karlekar, “Bangladesh: the next Afghanistan?,” (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), p.167.
3. “ Huji’r Amir, Afogan-o-Arakan Ferot Durdhorsho Joddha ebong Jongi Sangkranto Bivinno Chancholyokar Mamlar Onnotomo Prodhan Asami Maolana Shekh Farid Ahmed Atak,” (Author’s Translation), April 28, 2011, Available at: https://www.rab.gov.bd/news_dtls.php?nid=6584.
4. IoJ members have direct ties with HuJI leadership and as conglomerate support Taliban and al-Qaeda ideology. One of its leaders is Mufti Shahidul Islam, himself an Afghan jihad veteran, whose charity al-Markazul Islami was founded on the direction of al-Qaeda leadership and aided HuJI’s activities in Bangladesh.
5. For a compilation of returned Bangladeshi veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, see, “List of 282 Afghan-trained returnees,” News From Bangladesh, August 24, 2005.
6. For a video from Bengali language ATN News , depicting details of Shaykh Farid’s arrest and his Afghan and Burmese links, See, https://news.priyo.com/video/2011/04/27/24566.html.
