BangladeshMore than 8,000 arrested in Bangladesh in anti-Islamist crackdown

Security forces in Bangladesh have arrested 3,245 people in the last twenty-four hours as part of broad campaign to put an end to a wave of Islamist violence against minorities, human rights activists, and pro-democracy bloggers.

The total number of Islamists, and those suspected of Islamist sympathies, arrested since the campaign began last Friday no stands at 8,192, according the Bangladesh government sources.

Al Jazeera reports that in the past two years, at least eighteen people, including atheist bloggers, foreign aid workers and religious minorities, have been killed by Islamist militants. In two separate incidents last week, two Hindus were killed.

The attacks raised questions about the willingness of the secular government in the Muslim-majority to confront the more extreme Islamist factions in the country in order to protect minorities and secular intellectuals.

It appears that what finally persuaded the government to launch the anti-Islamist crackdown was last week’s killing by Islamists of the wife of a police superintendent, who was in charge of the operations against Islamist militants and drug cartels. The brutal killing of a family member of a high government official shocked the Bangladesh’s political establishment. Two days after the killing, prime minister Sheikh Hasina vowed to root out Islamist radicals and defeat their campaign to impose Islamic rule in the country.

The authorities say that the interrogations of the thousands of Islamists arrested since Friday would help the security services gain a better understanding of the relationship between local Islamist activists and transnational Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda affiliates and ISIS.

The government’s official position is that transnational terrorist groups are not operating in Bangladesh. Rather, the government blames the attacks of the last two years on domestic Islamist groups aligned with political opposition parties.

Terrorism experts say, however, that this official line has less to do with the realities of Islamist activity in Bangladesh, and more to do with the ruling party’s political calculations.

The government has presented no evidence of the relationship between opposition parties and Islamist terrorism, and opposition denies the government’s allegations.