Tag Archives: Militants

What went wrong? Bangladesh Militant’s Father seeks answers

Study table of Meer Saameh Mubasheer is pictured in his room at his family home, in Dhaka

By Aditya Kalra and Serajul Quadir

DHAKA (Reuters) – On the last Friday of Ramadan, Meer Hayet Kabir was hoping his son Meer Saameh Mubasheer, missing for the past four months, would come home. In Bangladesh, even kidnappers sometimes released hostages on a holy day.

The 18-year-old did return to the capital Dhaka that night, but not to his father. Instead police believe he, along with at least four other gunmen, attacked an upscale restaurant in the city and murdered 20 people, mostly foreigners.

Now he is dead, killed with his fellow assailants by police.

On Tuesday, still in shock, Kabir was trying to make sense of what happened and what made the quiet, soft-spoken teenager give up a privileged life and loving home in one of Dhaka’s upscale neighborhoods to take up arms in the name of radical Islamism. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.

“Something has gone wrong. Something has gone wrong,” said Kabir, 53, holding back tears as he showed pictures from Mubasheer’s 18th birthday in December on his iPad.

“I still don’t want to believe my son has done it with his own, conscious mind,” he told a small group of reporters who visited his home.

It is a question many people in Bangladesh are asking after the attack on Friday, one of the most brazen in the South Asian nation’s history and potentially damaging to its $26 billion garment export industry.

Most of the attackers were young like Mubasheer, went to some of the best schools and came from well-to-do families.

Another suspected attacker, Nibras Islam, was around 22 and went to Monash University in Malaysia, where a bachelor’s course costs nearly $9,000 a year, at least six times the average income in Bangladesh.

As the stories of the militants emerge, they are challenging the popular narrative that poverty and illiteracy are the key ingredients in the making of a South Asian militant.

Kabir, a telecoms executive, blamed Islamist groups in the country for luring his son away. Some people close to the family blamed it on the Internet, while Kabir thinks the smartphone he gave his son months before his disappearance might have been the way extremist groups reached him.

He said that if such groups could radicalize someone who came from a loving family and was getting secular education at the elite Dhaka school Scholastica, no one should feel safe.

“We are a caring family,” Kabir said. “If they can steal my son from my family, they can steal anybody’s kid.”

H.T. Imam, political adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, told Reuters the attackers could not have acted alone and must have come in contact with radicals who influenced them. Imam said the militants’ parents should also be investigated.

 

DINOSAURS, MOVIES

As a child, Kabir said his son was interested in dinosaurs and could memorize several of the animals’ complicated names.

“His one speciality is that once he is interested in something he will get into details,” Kabir said.

During a visit to India around eight years ago, the family visited the city of Agra, home to the famous Taj Mahal. After that, Mubasheer became interested in history and started drawing pictures of Mughal emperor Akbar and Hindu Goddess Durga.

Over the next few years, he also began to study Bangladesh’s history, including its 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.

“He would buy independence war-related movies, dramas. That was his craze,” Kabir said.

Mubasheer was also fond of watching English films and cartoons. Occasionally he cooked food for himself and his father.

In the months before his disappearance, Kabir said he noticed no visible change in his behavior, other than that he stopped using Facebook and focussed more on studies.

Family pictures at their spacious home, complete with tiled floors and a chandelier, depicted a normal childhood; in one, Mubasheer stands with his elder brother and plays a synthesizer.

But his “mental growth was slow,” Kabir said.

“His classmates also noticed it. They would say he was a Mamma’s boy. He would not like it.”

Other than hobbies, Mubasheer was always interested in religion. His father advised him to use the right sources for learning about the subject when he gave him an English version of the Koran.

“Sometimes he would say he wants to become an accountant, sometimes he would say theology or sociology,” Kabir said.

Inside Mubasheer’s small bedroom, a photograph of the Koran hung on a wall behind his bed, next to a study table that was covered with books on business studies, accounting and TOEFL, an English language test.

Mubasheer would usually pray five times a day and visit a nearby mosque.

Kabir has yet to go and identify the body believed to be that of his son.

“I am hoping a miracle happens, that he is not one of these guys.”

(Writing by Aditya Kalra; Editing by Paritosh Bansal and Mike Collett-White)

Tunisian prisoners tell of life with Islamic State in Libya

Olfa, 39, mother of Rahma who is the wife of Nurdine Chouchan, who was killed during a U.S. air strike in Libya, reacts during an interview with Reuters in Tunisia

By Aidan Lewis and Ahmed Elumami

TRIPOLI (Reuters) – When a U.S. air strike hit Sabratha in western Libya on Feb. 19, it reduced a building on the southern fringes of the city to rubble, killing dozens of militants and exposing a network of Islamic State cells operating just near the Tunisian border.

It also upended the lives of three young Tunisian women who were married to militants killed in the strike or its aftermath, and are now being held with their children in a Tripoli prison.

The women’s accounts, given in a rare interview, shed light on how Islamic State was able to operate largely undisturbed in Sabratha as the cell’s mainly Tunisian members plotted attacks back in their home country.

It is also an illustration of how the militant group may continue to find space amid Libya’s turmoil even as it risks losing its stronghold of Sirte, another Libyan coastal city further to the east.

“We lived normally in the city, the neighbors knew us. We even went to the market and to the beauty salon,” said Rahma al-Shekhawi, the 17-year–old wife of Noureddine Chouchane, a senior commander who officials say was killed in the February strike.

Some militants stayed in Sabratha as they prepared to move on to Sirte or to Syria, but most were planning operations in Tunisia, she said. “They were buying weapons under the eyes of our neighbors.”

Local officials in Sabratha have long denied or played down Islamic State’s presence in the city and it was not possible to confirm those statements.

But U.S. and Tunisian officials say Chouchane played an important role in preparing two major attacks on tourists last year, first at a museum in Tunis and then on a beach in the resort city of Sousse, after which he became a wanted figure.

But in Sabratha “the authorities never came looking for us even though everyone knew where we lived,” she said. “It only changed after the strike.”

LOOSE STRUCTURE

Islamic State began expanding into Libya in late 2014, as fighters from the Libyan-dominated al-Battar battalion returned to the eastern city of Derna.

Over the following year, the group joined a military campaign in Benghazi, took full control of Sirte and carried out attacks in Tripoli, partly by merging with or recruiting local militants from the al Qaeda-linked group Ansar al Sharia.

Yet Islamic State failed to make the kind of rapid advances it achieved in the Middle East, struggling to raise revenue or win broad support in Libya’s fractured society.

Membership tilted increasingly towards foreign fighters, with Tunisians the most numerous, residents and officials say.

In Sirte, the group set up a proto-state that followed the model established in Iraq and Syria, taxing residents, enforcing strict rules over dress and education and carrying out regular public punishments including executions. It has since lost parts of the city to pro-government forces.

But in Sabratha, where Tunisians were especially dominant, there was a looser structure, the prisoners said.

“There was no leader in Sabratha, everyone did their own thing,” said Rahma al-Shekhawi, though she said the main focus was on expanding into Tunisia.

Rahma’s sister Ghofran, 18, also married to an Islamic State member, said militants in Sabratha were divided into cells that were ready to defy the group’s hierarchical structures.

“Each group had an emir who was working on his own strategy – some were making passports for Syria, some were working on Tunisia and others were working on Libya,” she said.

“They always asked for instructions from the emir in Syria, who told them to obey the emir in Sirte, but they refused and they took decisions by themselves.”

CLASHES

Only after February’s air strike did local Libyan brigades, known as “thuwar” (revolutionaries) because of their role in the 2011 uprising that toppled veteran leader Muammar Gaddafi, take on the Islamic State militants in their midst.

With planes circling over the city, residents began searching for militants partly because they feared further strikes, said Wahida Bin Mukhtar al-Rabhi, the third Tunisian prisoner.

Rabhi and her 2-year-old son, and Ghofran with her 5-month-old daughter, fled south towards the desert with their husbands.

Rabhi said they went without food for a day as they tried to arrange help to get to the nearby town of Zawiya.

“The clashes started, and my son Bara was hit by bullets in his stomach and back. At that point my husband started shouting, ‘there are women and children with us’, but the thuwar didn’t want to stop because they knew we were Islamic State and we might blow ourselves up.”

Rabhi said she was searched and beaten by the local brigades and then handed over to Tripoli’s Special Deterrence Force, who took her to identify her husband’s body.

Her son was given treatment in a local hospital before they were both brought to the prison in the capital where dozens of other Islamic State suspects are also held.

Despite their uncertain future in Libya, the women say they don’t want to return to Tunisia, where they suffered poverty and persecution for their Islamist beliefs.

“I want to be happy with my son, I want to get back to my life,” said Rabhi. “I don’t want my son to grow up in prison.”

(Editing by Gareth Jones)

Iraqi forces take Falluja government building from Islamic State: state TV

Iraqi army vehicles

By Thaier al-Sudani

FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi forces recaptured the municipal building in Falluja from Islamic State militants, the military said on Friday, nearly four weeks after the start of a U.S.-backed offensive to retake the city an hour’s drive west of Baghdad.

The ultra-hardline militants still control a significant portion of Falluja, where the conflict has forced the evacuation of most residents and many streets and houses remain mined with explosives.

A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition backing Baghdad’s quest to recover large swathes of western and northern Iraq from Islamic State told Reuters that government forces were “close (to the building) but don’t have control yet”.

A military statement said the federal police had raised the Iraqi state flag above the government building and were continuing to pursue insurgents.

A Reuters photographer in a southern district of Falluja said clashes involving aerial bombardment, artillery and machine gun fire were continuing. Clouds of smoke could be seen rising up from areas closer to the city center.

Heavily armed Interior Ministry police units were advancing along Baghdad Street, the main east-west road running through the city, and commandos from the counter-terrorism service (CTS) had surrounded Falluja hospital, the statement said.

Sabah al-Numani, a CTS spokesman, said on state television that snipers holed up inside the hospital, considered a nest of militants, were resisting but the facility was expected to be retaken within hours.

Government forces, with air support from the U.S.-led coalition, launched a major operation on May 23 to retake Falluja, an historic bastion of the Sunni Muslim insurgency against U.S. forces that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003, and the Shi’ite-led governments that followed.

The city is seen as a launchpad for recent Islamic State (IS) bombings in the capital, making the offensive a crucial part of the government’s campaign to improve security.

U.S. allies would prefer to concentrate on Islamic State-held Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city that is located in the far north of the country.

Enemies of Islamic State have uncorked major offensives against the jihadists on other fronts, including a thrust by U.S.-backed forces against the city of Manbij in northern Syria.

The offensives amount to the most sustained pressure on IS since it proclaimed a caliphate in 2014.

MASS DISPLACEMENT

Islamic State has begun allowing thousands of civilians trapped in central Falluja to escape and the sudden exodus has overwhelmed displacement camps already filled beyond capacity.

More than 6,000 families left on Thursday alone, according to Falluja Mayor Issa al-Issawi, who fled the IS seizure of Falluja two years ago. He told Reuters on Friday: “We don’t know how to deal with this large number of civilians.”

The number of displaced people as of Thursday surpassed 68,000, according to the United Nations, which recently estimated Falluja’s total population at 90,000, only about a third of the total in 2010.

Witnesses said Islamic State had announced via loudspeakers that residents could leave if they wanted, but it was unclear why the group changed tact after clamping down on civilian movement only a few days ago.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which has been providing aid to displaced people, said escapees reported a sudden retreat of IS fighters at key checkpoints inside Falluja that had allowed civilians to leave.

Humanitarian needs were expected to increase dramatically in the coming hours, swamping the resources of foreign aid groups and the government as they struggle with funding shortfalls.

“Aid services in the camps were already overstretched and this development will push us all to the limit,” said NRC country director Nasr Muflahi.

Islamic State, which by U.S. estimates has been ousted from almost half of the territory it seized when Iraqi forces partially collapsed in 2014, has used residents as human shields to slow the military’s advance and help avoid air strikes.

Defence Ministry spokesman Naseer Nuri said the surge in displaced people was “proof that (Islamic State) has lost control over the city and its residents”.

(Additional reporting by Saif Hameed and Stephen Kalin in Baghdad; Editing by Mark Heinrich)