Last Count

Muhammad Habibur Rahman, imam of Farajibari Jame Mosque in Jhalakathi, who won the Best (khamari) Farmer Award in 2013, could remember most of the issues he had learnt during the course but nothing about militancy.

Asked why, he said, “Militancy was discussed but not as importantly as other issues. We were asked to give sermons but I could not do it.”

Another imam, Md Ismail Hossain, who too got the Best Farmer Award, can recall hardly anything about militancy. “It came up in the middle of discussions on other issues.”

On Friday, The Daily Star correspondents in Rajshahi, Pabna and Chittagong, who attended the Juma prayers at the local mosques, said there was nothing against militancy in the sermons. The imams in those mosques were trained by the Foundation.

In contrast, Md Bashir Uddin, imam of Fakirpara Jame Mosque in Chapainawabganj, spoke against extremism in his sermon. Interestingly, he did not take the Islamic Foundation training.

No. 5. Terrorism still remains a relatively minor threat, statistically speaking.

That’s no consolation to the victims or their loved ones, but it might offer some solace to the rest of us. Those scary statistics you sometimes see about the alleged vast increase in global terrorism include attacks occurring in regions wracked by ongoing armed conflicts, such as Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, and Afghanistan. According to the 2015 Global Terrorism Index, between 2000 and 2014, only 2.6 percent of victims of terrorism lived in Western countries. Stay away from active war zones, and the average American is far more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist. And gun violence in the United States? I won’t even go there.

No matter how you look at it, those of us who live in the West have it pretty easy. Gun violence in the United States notwithstanding, we live longer, we’re less likely to die of preventable disease, and we’re far less likely to die violently than those in non-Western countries. If you live in Iraq, Libya, or Syria — or Nigeria, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Honduras, or South Sudan — violent death is a constant possibility. If you live in Paris or Boston or Ottowa, relax.

#ISIS claims second assassination in #Bangladesh, this time on 65 yr-old Japanese man Kunio Hoshi in #Dhaka

Shooting spot is 335 kilometer away from Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh.  Attacks on foreigners are rare in Bangladesh. But it has seen a rising tide of Islamist violence over the past year, in which four online critics of religious militancy were hacked to death, among them a U.S. citizen of Bangladeshi origin. On Saturday, Islamic State warned of more attacks.

"There will continue to be a series of ongoing security operations against nationals of crusader coalition countries, they will not have safety or a livelihood in Muslim lands," the group tweeted.

The motive behind the murder of Japanese Kunio Hoshi, the second foreigner to be killed in Bangladesh in a week, is to foment instability in the country, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal has said. In the meantime, government’s intention of lessening these types occurrences’ severity is not absent this time. Sheikh Hasina’s advisor H T Imam claimed Kunio Hoshi is not a Japanese citizen.  

Five people, including two students of Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST), hacked Ananta Bijoy Das to death for “his write-ups”, claimed CID, quoting one of the “attackers”. Detectives yesterday pressed charges against five alleged members of Ansarullah Bangla Team in blogger Oyasiqur Rahman Babu murder case.

Hindu nationalists were angered by his criticism of idol worship

An outspoken Indian rationalist scholar and college professor who had drawn the ire of religious groups for denouncing superstition and idol worship was shot dead by two unidentified assailants at his home in the southern state of Karnataka over the weekend.

M.M. Kalburgi, who was 77 years old, was killed when he was visited by two young men at his residence in the small town of Dharward early on Sunday morning. Reacting to Kalburgi’s killing, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, the state’s top elected official, acknowledged that there had been threats to the slain professor’s life. “It is true that there was threat to Professor Kalburgi’s life from some groups,” he told the Hindustan Times. “No effort will be spared to find the killers.”

International policy analyst Benedetta Berti gave an excellent Ted-talk emphasizing factors behind terrorist groups’ power. Full text of the speech was published by TED.

For the past decade, I've been studying non-state armed groups: armed organizations like terrorists, insurgents or militias. I document what these groups do when they're not shooting. My goal is to better understand these violent actors and to study ways to encourage transition from violent engagement to nonviolent confrontation. I work in the field, in the policy world and in the library.

Understanding non-state armed groups is key to solving most ongoing conflict, because war has changed. It used to be a contest between states. No longer. It is now a conflict between states and non-state actors. For example, of the 216 peace agreements signed between 1975 and 2011, 196 of them were between a state and a non-state actor. So we need to understand these groups; we need to either engage them or defeat them in any conflict resolution process that has to be successful.

So how do we do that? We need to know what makes these organizations tick. We know a lot about how they fight, why they fight, but no one looks at what they're doing when they're not fighting. Yet, armed struggle and unarmed politics are related. It is all part of the same organization. We cannot understand these groups, let alone defeat them, if we don't have the full picture.

And armed groups today are complex organizations. Take the Lebanese Hezbollah, known for its violent confrontation against Israel. But since its creation in the early 1980s, Hezbollah has also set up a political party, a social-service network, and a military apparatus. Similarly, the Palestinian Hamas, known for its suicide attacks against Israel, also runs the Gaza Strip since 2007. So these groups do way more than just shoot. They multi-task. They set up complex communication machines -- radio stations, TV channels, Internet websites and social media strategies. And up here, you have the ISIS magazine,printed in English and published to recruit. Armed groups also invest in complex fund-raising -- not looting, but setting up profitable businesses; for example, construction companies. Now, these activities are keys. They allow these groups to increase their strength, increase their funds, to better recruit and to build their brand.

Armed groups also do something else: they build stronger bonds with the population by investing in social services. They build schools, they run hospitals, they set up vocational-training programs or micro-loan programs. Hezbollah offers all of these services and more. Armed groups also seek to win the population over by offering something that the state is not providing: safety and security. The initial rise of the Taliban in war-torn Afghanistan, or even the beginning of the ascent of ISIS, can be understood also by looking at these groups' efforts to provide security. Now, unfortunately, in these cases, the provision of security came at an unbearably high price for the population. But in general, providing social services fills a gap, a governance gap left by the government, and allows these groups to increase their strength-and their power. For example, the 2006 electoral victory of the Palestinian Hamas cannot be understood without acknowledging the group's social work.

Now, this is a really complex picture, yet in the West, when we look at armed groups, we only think of the violent side. But that's not enough to understand these groups' strength, strategy or long-term vision.These groups are hybrid. They rise because they fill a gap left by the government, and they emerge to be both armed and political, engage in violent struggle and provide governance.

And the more these organizations are complex and sophisticated, the less we can think of them as the opposite of a state. Now, what do you call a group like Hezbollah? They run part of a territory, they administer all their functions, they pick up the garbage, they run the sewage system. Is this a state? Is it a rebel group? Or maybe something else, something different and new? And what about ISIS? The lines are blurred. We live in a world of states, non-states, and in-between, and the more states are weak, like in the Middle East today, the more non-state actors step in and fill that gap. This matters for governments, because to counter these groups, they will have to invest more in non-military tools. Filling that governance gap has to be at the center of any sustainable approach. This also matters very much for peacemaking and peace building. If we better understand armed groups, we will better know what incentives to offer to encourage the transition from violence to nonviolence.

So in this new contest between states and non-states, military power can win some battles, but it will not give us peace nor stability. To achieve these objectives, what we need is a long-term investment in filling that security gap, in filling that governance gap that allowed these groups to thrive in the first place.

Avijit Roy was hacked to death in February as he left a university book fair. Washiqur Rahman was murdered in March as he left his house for work. Ananta Bijoy Ras was butchered in May while en route to his job at a bank. And on Friday, Niloy Neel was killed by a group of men who snuck into his fourth-floor apartment, again armed with machetes, and beheaded him.

All four men were secularist bloggers and activists who used Facebook to rail against religion and discuss its negative impact on Bangladeshi society. And all four men were murdered by machete-wielding Islamic militants, illustrating a troubling trend in Bangladesh where secularists are increasingly targeted for their views. An estimated 90% of Bangladesh's population is Muslim, making Islam far and away the majority religion.

Ansar-Al-Islam, a Bangladesh chapter of al-Qaeda in the Indian Sub-Continent, claimed responsibility for the most recent attack.

"There were six people who knocked on his door, saying that they were looking to rent a flat. Two of them then took him to a room and slaughtered him there,” Muntashirul Islam, a deputy police commissioner, told the Guardian. Neel, whose real name is Niloy Chakrabarti, had reportedly requested police protection in recent weeks. It is not clear why the request wasn't granted. As recently as May the blogger told the paper "he was scared that he would be killed and that he had tried to file reports with local police about continued harassment," it said. "He claimed his complaints were not taken seriously." "What was already a human rights crisis has now spun entirely out of control, and it is now long overdue for the government of Bangladesh to take seriously its moral responsibility to protect the lives of its people," said Ronald A. Lindsay, president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry (CFI), an Amherst-based nonprofit devoted to fostering a secular society, in a statement to Mashable.

It appears as if the Turkish government is using ISIS as a pretext to attack the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party).

Turkey just announced that its air base at Incirlik will soon be open to coalition forces, presumably to fight ISIS. But the moment Turkey started bombing, it targeted Kurdish positions in Iraq, in addition to targeting ISIS positions in Syria.

In Turkey, millions of indigenous Kurds are continually terrorized and murdered, but ISIS terrorists can freely travel and use official border crossings to go to Syria and return to Turkey; they are even treated at Turkish hospitals.

Turkey’s 12th Gay Pride Parade was held on Istanbul’s crowded Istiklal Avenue. Thousands marched joyfully carrying rainbow flags until the police began dispersing them with water cannons. The authorities, as has become their custom since the Gezi Park protests of June 2013, once again decided not to allow a demonstration by secular Turks who don’t fit into their vision of the ideal citizen.

More worrying news came a week later when posters were put up in Ankara with a chilling instruction: “If you see those carrying out the People of Lot’s dirty work, kill the doer and the done!” The “People of Lot” was a religious reference to gays, and the instruction to kill them on sight was attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. The group that put the posters up, the so-called Islamic Defense Youth, defended its message by asserting: “What? Are you offended by the words of our prophet?!”

Police role during Avijit’s murder is always questionable. They sparked new debate on it.  When Avijit’s wife Bonya was in London to give a speech suddenly Bangladesh Police announced that they identified murderer and Bonya was involved in the process.  Whereas Bonya told no one from Bangladesh police or FBI discussed the issue with her.  Why police has to make announcement of the development without arresting murderers? Avijit and Bonya’s blogging platform Muktomona reacted on the issue with figuring out some questions on police and government role. 

The Sun newspaper reported Tuesday the footage posted online showed five workers wearing overalls and balaclavas laughing as a South Asian colleague wearing an orange jumpsuit knelt at their feet.

One held a coat hanger as a pretend knife while another held the kneeling man by the shoulders. One employee then yells "Allahu Akbar!" — Arabic for "God is great" — a phrase often used before IS hostages are slain.

Police have been criticised for failing to arrest a man who was seen wandering near Big Ben draped in an Islamic State flag.

The man was photographed walking past a group of Scouts outside the Houses of Parliament as he wore a large Isis flag on his back. He was carrying a small child on his shoulders, who was waving a smaller flag in their hand.