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The rise and fall of Bangla Bhai As Shaikh Abdur Rahman and Bangla Bhai — leaders of the Islamist militant group JMB — face the death penalty this month, Mahtab Haider visits Baghmara, where their reign of terror began When Mosammat Abeda, 49, found her 20-year-old son Yasin on the morning of April 30, 2004, splinters of bone had broken through the blood-caked skin on his arms and knees. The night before, on April 29, eight masked men had come knocking on Abeda’s door, looking for her Yasin. ‘They had hockey-sticks and machetes and their faces were covered in black cloth wraps,’ remembers Yasin’s elder brother Ibrahim, 30. ‘They didn’t need to tell us who they were; they were Bangla’s men — everyone here knows what hockey sticks and machetes mean.’    This month, as six Islamist militants including Shaikh Abdur Rahman and Siddiqul Islam alias Bangla Bhai face execution, many in Baghmara — where the militants first rose into prominence — will be relieved. But for many more, the death of six individuals will not be enough to avenge the brutality they suffered, and more importantly, they know all too well that these militants were part of a larger phenomenon, not a cult hinged on individuals.    As the March sun beats down on the village of Shakhowa in Baghmara thana, 138 km from Rajshahi, not a leaf stirs in the stifling heat. Inside Abeda’s house, a sari tied end-to-end to the four wicker walls makes a false ceiling to dispel the heat radiating from the tin roof. On the wall hangs a framed picture of Yasin, taken in a studio in Rajshahi five years ago. ‘I am waiting every day to hear the news that those animals have been hanged,’ says Abeda.    ‘Yasin had left for my sister’s house that afternoon and I told the men I didn’t know where he was but if he had committed some mistake, I would punish him,’ remembers Ibrahim. ‘They pushed me to the ground and started beating me with the hockey sticks. When people started gathering, they said Yasin had three days to surrender at their local camp. Then they left.’    Yasin’s luck didn’t last him three days.    The next morning, on their way to warn the boy in the neighbouring village where he was staying, the family came across a three-wheeler tempo packed with Bangla Bhai’s cadre, sitting in facing rows in the rear. The men all wore beards and kurtas that ran down well beyond their knees. On the floor of the van was Yasin, the men resting their feet on his body.    ‘When we found him, they had separated the flesh from the splintered bones on his arms and legs but the rest of his body was untouched and he was alive,’ Abeda remembers. ‘We took him to the medical [hospital] where he died lying there on the veranda.’    ‘It has been three years and we still don’t know what Yasin’s crime was,’ says Ibrahim’s wife Nargis. ‘He was an electrician in Rajshahi town, and earned 3,000 taka per month. He was to be married that year. He had no reason to go looking for trouble with Bangla’s men. Some people say they killed him because he supported the [Awami] League, but he didn’t do politics. Other people in the village say Bangla wanted him to join them and he refused. No one really knows.’        It was this Baghmara that first made headlines in 2003 as the terrorised heartland of the banned Islamist group Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh. Hundreds of young men from the local villages suspected by the JMB of belonging to the radical leftist group Purbo Bangla Communist party — locally known as the Sarbahara — were hunted down, strung up on trees and publicly beaten to death. In most cases it was compulsory for their family and the villagers to come and watch the executions.    ‘If someone from the audience fainted from the brutality, they would stop the beatings, throw water on his or her face, revive him, and then continue the execution,’ a local schoolteacher told me. ‘In the case of a man called Mukul, Bangla Bhai and his men arranged for loudspeakers so that people in the neighbouring village, including his aged mother, could hear him scream as they beat him to death with iron rods and hockey sticks while he hung upside down from a tree,’ says local journalist Zillur Rahman.    By the time the reign of terror came to an end, hundreds of people had been killed in this way in Baghmara, at makeshift camps where shamiana-bound bamboo compartments served as torture cells, and spine-chilling screams of agony split the stillness of the village night.    ‘You cannot imagine the terror we had to live through,’ says Hamirkutsha resident Boltu, who digs pit latrines for a living. ‘Two months after the killings started and the camps had become permanent, Bangla’s men asked me to dig some pit latrines for them by the river. Two days later they asked me to come back and dig some more latrines. When I went there, the earlier latrines I had dug had been filled. Some days later, I dug some more latrines for them, and I saw all the previous ones had been filled.’    Among those who survived the worst excesses of JMB torture in Baghmara’s Hamirkutsha union is Rafiqul, 46, a chain man at the bazaar cycle-van stand. Rafiqul, who used to be a motor mechanic heard on April 8, 2004 that his name was on a list of men that Bangla Bhai wanted to question about local Sarbahara activity. ‘I was scared but I never had anything to do with the Sarbahara so I went and surrendered at their camp on April 10,’ says Rafiqul. Having spent the night locked up in a room at local Jamaat-e-Islami patron Ramzan Kaya’s house — which served as a JMB camp — Rafiqul was woken up after Fazr prayers the next morning and taken to a field across the road.    ‘Suddenly, without a word, eight to ten men started beating me with hockey sticks and rods,’ he says. His right fist rests on the table gnarled out of shape as he tells the story of how they shattered every bone in that arm with hockey sticks, while three JMB cadre pinned him down. ‘Of course they didn’t get anything out of me — because I knew nothing. So then they sat me down, put a chair on my head, on which Bangla Bhai sat, for how many hours I don’t know as he passed judgment on their other prisoners.’ Rafiqul’s spine is permanently damaged and on his back he still bears the scars where the iron rods had entered his flesh.    As much as the state machinery, the political parties, and the intelligence agencies might promote a different view, the Bangla Bhai phenomenon cannot be explained in the black-and-white context of radical Islamists who terrorised a peaceful village to establish Islamic rule. Peace and security had fled Baghmara long before the JMB arrived there. In fact, the JMB was born as a radical response to the violence that had gripped Baghmara for over a decade prior to 2004.    The story of the militants’ rise, that culminated in their coordinated bombings in 63 districts of the country on August 17, 2005, is also the story of how the people of Baghmara, the local administration, and the government of the day in Dhaka had given them succour and support. While the local people, who saw and suffered the JMB atrocities, withdrew their support after the first few months, Bangla Bhai and his group’s rising strength had become too politically expedient, and potentially dangerous, for the BNP-Jamaat alliance to orphan the militants. To fully understand the birth of a violent and radical Islamist group in the remote Rajshahi village of Baghmara, it is important to understand the context into which it was born.    It was on April 1, 2004 that Bangla Bhai and the JMB supremo Shaikh Abdur Rahman first launched their activities in Baghmara. ‘They came to the people of this thana as saviours,’ says a local school principal. ‘Over the past decade, the Sarbahara had become so strong in this region that in some villages it had become impossible to walk the streets even in broad daylight. They could go into any house and demand all their grain, or lakhs of taka, and if you didn’t pay up, your son or you would end up on a roadside one night, slaughtered.’ In the years preceding the rise of the JMB, the Sarbahara, who have long replaced their leftist political ideology with more profitable activities like extortion and violence, would openly carry automatic weapons and machetes through the major roads of Baghmara, with the administration turning a blind eye. Their signature assassination style was to slit their victims’ throats ear to ear. Over the past decade, hundreds of their opponents including police personnel in Rajshahi, Bogra, Kushtia and neighbouring districts, have been killed in this way by the Sarbahara.    The JMB had existed institutionally since 1998, headed by Shaikh Abdur Rahman, who was originally a senior member and patron of the militant outfit Harkatul Jihad. The Shaikh had reportedly been trained by and had fought alongside the Mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. On his return to Dhaka he joined Harkat with the publicly announced aim of establishing a Taliban-style government here in Bangladesh. According to intelligence sources, he is believed to have left Harkat in 1998 over ideological differences and formed the Jamaatul Mujideen Bangladesh.    In recent months it has emerged — through the confessions of Harkat leader Mufti Abdul Hannan — that it was his outfit that carried out the assassination attempts on Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina, British High Commissioner Anwar Choudhury as well as the 2001 bombing of Pahela Baishakh celebrations at Dhaka’s Ramna Batamul. It was also around 2000 that Siddiqul Islam — a Islami Chatra Shibir cadre of Rajshahi University who taught at the Shibir-run coaching centre Retina in Bogra — came into contact with the Shaikh. The two paired up to strengthen the JMB ranks and are believed to have received extensive explosives training at Rohingya militant camps in Chittagong’s south. Their activities included social work in the country’s poverty-prone northern districts, and it was here that they spotted their first opportunity to prove their real resolve.    According to locals — and confirmed by media reports on confessions the sentenced militants have given to security agencies — it was the Sarbahara’s killing of erstwhile junior BNP minister Ruhul Kuddus Talukdar Dulu’s nephew in Baghmara that heralded the rise of the JMB. Unable to rein in the radical leftists using security agencies, the local administration and the local BNP top brass, where Dulu featured prominently, appear to have outsourced the task to a group of willing Islamist militants. Confessional statements prove that the BNP leaders not only funded and armed the militants in Baghmara, they were also given the assurance that they could cleanse the Sarbahara in that region with the active cooperation of the law enforcing agencies. In the first three weeks dozens of young men like Rafiqul and Yasin in the Baghmara-Atrail-Tanore belt were picked up by Bangla Bhai’s men and tortured or killed. Initially, all the Baghmara residents even supported the pogrom, setting up checkpoints at every street corner and volunteering as scouts across the village to prevent a Sarbahara backlash.    ‘We don’t deny it,’ says Afzal Hossain, a village elder at Hamirkutsha. ‘Now everyone has forgotten that the Sarbahara would come to this bazaar and announce on the microphone that they wanted all of us to attend a sabha during which they could prove that god does not exist,’ Hossain says. ‘They picked up innocent men and women and killed them, dumping their bodies on the roads — because they had been unable to pay them chanda or because they supported another political party.’        From April 2004, after Bangla Bhai launched his cleansing operation, Baghmara underwent a dramatic change. ‘All the women had to wear burkhas, all the men had to say their prayers five times a day, it was forbidden to smoke, it was compulsory to grow your beard, and if you didn’t do all these you were beaten mercilessly at the bazaar: made an example of,’ says Hossain.    But something else caught the Baghmara residents’ eyes and it slowly turned public opinion against Bangla Bhai and his men. ‘We slowly started noticing that many of the most feared Sarbahara cadre had now started keeping beards and had joined Bangla Bhai,’ says Hossain. And with this change in the ranks, the JMB rose to its true form to become the new oppressor. They started demanding protection money from the Baghmara residents, rich or poor. ‘The poor had to give their grains, the rich gave them cash,’ says one farmer. Local resident Safinoor’s husband had to flee the village because he had refused to pay the Tk1 lakh that Bangla Bhai had demanded as a contribution to his jihad.    ‘The Bangla cadre came to our house and used their hockey sticks to break everything from the meat-safe to the lights and the windows,’ says Safinoor, who now lives in Rajshahi with her husband. Anyone who worked in the fields owned by Safinoor’s family would be fined Tk 10,000 and given ten hits of the hockey stick, Bangla Bhai is reported to have announced at the local bazaar.    But even as the local people slowly started withdrawing their support of the JMB, and often did the militants’ bidding out of fear of reprisals, what instilled real fear in the hearts of the people of Baghmara was the support the militants got from the local police. ‘We have seen with our own eyes how the militants would pass through this bazaar riding motorcycles, carrying machetes and hockey sticks, escorted by police jeeps taking the front and the rear,’ says Mozammel Hoq, a local potato trader. Hundreds of residents of Baghmara confirm that the JMB carried out their activities in broad daylight for the first year, with the local police backing them. ‘They would torture men at the camps, sometimes even kill them, and then a police van would arrive in the evening and take them away,’ says one local journalist. ‘The ones that remained alive were shown arrested by the police, and the dead ones were mostly “disappeared”.’    As we stand at the field facing the Aloknagar School at Hamirkutsha, which had also served as a torture camp, locals point out the bamboo poles where innumerable young men had been strung up and beaten to death by Bangla Bhai and the Shaikh’s men. ‘One of the times, right here where we are standing, the local police sub-inspector Shiraj tried to stop Bangla Bhai from slitting a man’s throat. “You can’t do this publicly,” Shiraj said. Bangla Bhai took out his mobile phone and called the Rajshahi superintendent of police, Masud Mia, handed the phone to Shiraj and said “Ei ney, tor baaper shathey kotha bol,”’ says Afzal Hossain.    A year later, in February 2005, Masud Mia would be terminated from his post for ‘patronising militant activities in the area.’ But Masud Mia is only a pawn in the game, as Baghmara residents will testify. Every major political leader in the area from the Jatiya Party’s Sardar Amjad Hossain, to BNP’s Rajshahi mayor Mizanur Rahman Minu, to local BNP lawmaker Barrister Aminul Haq, and junior BNP ministers Alamgir Kabir and Dulu, and even local Awami League leaders, are accused of giving the militants money and cover.        It would be another year of the home ministry and the BNP-Jamaat top brass and senior figures in the administration in Dhaka denying the existence of Bangla Bhai — all the time backing their operations — before they would force the militants to, at least, go underground. The turning point came on the night on January 22, 2005, when the militants attempted to assassinate local Awami League Sreepur union parishad chairman Moqbul Hossain Mridha.    The JMB had in the past abducted Mridha to their Hamirkutsha camp and asked for his support in fund-raising for their jihad. ‘Bangla Bhai and his top aide Mahtab Khamaru — who was recently arrested — sat me down at the camp and slit the throats of two of their captives in front of me, and then smiling, said they knew my businesses were doing well and they wanted my support,’ says Mridha. ‘Who would have the courage to refuse them anything after this?’ he asks. Even though he admits he allowed the militants to raise as much as Tk 2 crores from his constituency in the months that followed, they realised he was a political opponent because he refused to attend their meetings and announce his backing for them, Mridha says.    On the night of January 22, 10 JMB men tried to assassinate Mridha while he was on his way home. In the scuffle that followed the JMB operatives threw bombs at Mridha’s aides while trying to flee. ‘Luckily one of my men went to the nearby mosque and announced that Sarbahara men had tried to kill me, calling villagers to come out of their houses and catch them. As hundreds of people poured out of their houses, they caught and killed three of my assailants. It was only afterwards that we realised that the killers were not Sarbahara, they were JMB,’ Mridha recalls.    The next day the JMB called a gayebana janaza, or funeral in absentia, for their ‘martyrs’ at Baghmara’s administrative headquarters in Bhabaniganj. It was attended by hundreds of people, during which Bangla Bhai is said to have announced that they would avenge the deaths of their operatives. It was during this meeting that the aggressive JMB cadre first clashed with the police in which fifty were hurt including several policemen. That week as the police administration felt the need to be seen tackling the situation with adequate force, the JMB were instructed by the administration to go underground.    While JMB operations continued in Baghmara, no more public executions took place after this. Seven months later, when the JMB carried out their August 17 bomb blasts in 63 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts, public outrage and international pressure forced the administration in Dhaka to take note. According to intelligence reports, both Bangla Bhai and Shaikh Abdur Rahman remained in contact with top BNP-Jamaat leaders, and minister Dulu in particular, even after the August blasts. Bangla Bhai is believed to have been in touch with almost all his patrons in the two parties even on the day he was eventually arrested in Mymensingh on March 6, 2006, four days after his ideological mentor, the Shaikh, was arrested in Sylhet.        With the JMB-six facing the gallows, the previous BNP-Jamaat alliance government claimed that they had ‘broken the backs of Islamist militancy in Bangladesh’. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The information from the six militants’ confessions to the law enforcers leaked to the press in the past months indicate that the JMB was merely one failed experiment of a larger Islamist militancy phenomenon that is slowly but surely spreading its wings across Bangladesh. Had the JMB not carried out their August 17 blasts, their story may have been different, and Baghmara would undoubtedly still be in the grips of their continuing violence.    The Shaikh, Bangla Bhai and the JMB’s 10,000 or so members all have weapons and bomb-making training, and that training is part of a well-oiled machine that is still clanking away, rumoured to be funded by Islamic NGOs that masquerade as philanthropic organisations. The government — all governments — remain silent on whether there are indeed militant training camps along the Chittagong border with Burma. Most of the top leadership of the one organisation that mothered most of the militant factions, the Harkatul Jihad, still remain beyond the reach of the law. Meanwhile political patronage of militancy continues, to serve parochial interests. The government continues to treat Islamist militancy as a law and order problem rather than a political problem which, in reality, finds its roots in a madrassah education system that is largely beyond the ambit of the government’s control, and foreign jihad sponsors whose petro-dollars are flooding into Islamic NGOs that are mushrooming all over Bangladesh.    The rise and fall of the JMB will likely not tell the story of the end of Islamist militancy in Bangladesh. It is perhaps only a portent of things to come.