In the three months since a band of youths tortured and killed 20 hostages in a Dhaka restaurant, Bangladeshi intelligence officials say they're rooting out radicals and restoring security to the streets. Their evidence? Police raids that have killed about 40 suspected militants; hundreds of suspects detained in police dragnets; and new information on how the attack was financed by local sympathizers. There have also been no reported extremist attacks since shortly after the restaurant killings. The police raids followed an unprecedented crackdown over the summer, during which authorities arrested more than 14,000 people before July — most for petty crimes including theft and small-time drug smuggling. The arrests have continued, netting 1,200 suspected militants, some of whom are giving up useful information under questioning, intelligence officials say. But they refuse to say how many in total have been detained in recent months. When asked to quantify the anti-militant operation's success, Monirul Islam, the head of the police counter-terrorism and transnational crime units, said it was "60 to 70 percent." "Still, we need to apprehend some command-level people. We are looking for them," he said. Some analysts, however, say the pursuit of low-level operatives has done little to ensure national security or to reveal who was really behind the July 1 hostage-taking — the country's deadliest attack in years of sustained militant violence targeting writers, religious minorities and others deemed enemies of Islam. "Given the depth of the crisis, the country has still a long way to go," said Abdur Rashid, a security expert and a retired major general. "Our investigators are very good at traditional investigation, but this is a difficult case — finding the real people who planned, backed and helped execute the plan ... We do not know actually what is going on. We are depending on the police version only." Bangladesh's government has been under intense international pressure to crack down on militancy since the July attack, during which five Bangladeshi youths seized a popular eatery in Dhaka's diplomatic quarter and terrorized dozens of hostages overnight, eventually killing 20 of them, including 17 foreigners. Just days later, bombs hurled at a Muslim festival killed one and triggered public protests in Dhaka's streets, with Bangladeshis demanding the government do more to establish better security. In both cases, the government dismissed claims of responsibility by the Daesh (the so-called IS), and instead blamed domestic militants backed by the opposition. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said Daesh has no presence in the country, and is capitalizing on the bloodshed for propaganda purposes. The government continued to deny any Daesh role even after an August raid killed three suspected militants, including a Canadian man of Bangladeshi origin identified on a Daesh website as the extremist Sunni group's representative in Bangladesh. Authorities deny the man, Tamim Chowdhury, had any Daesh link, and instead say he was a leader within the banned militant group Jumatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh, or JMB. Officials denied any Daesh role again this week, even as police said one of the sources of financing for the restaurant attack was a pediatrician whom they say fled with his family to Syria to join the Daesh group. Two other men were also accused helping to provide a total of about $100,000 for the attack: a retired army major who donated his pension and savings, and another man who donated proceeds from an apartment sale in Dhaka. Both were killed in police raids. Some wonder if the government's insistence that the Daesh plays no part in the violence is short-sighted, and may prevent it from understanding how global militant networks may be operating in Bangladesh. "What matters isn't necessarily what the government says, but what it is investigating, and I believe they are investigating these connections," said foreign policy analyst Veena Sikri, a former Indian ambassador to Bangladesh. She said investigations have shown at least a tenuous connection between Daesh and some recent attacks in Bangladesh, with Daesh working through expatriate Bangladeshis as the extremist group tries to establish itself in the country — as they are attempting to do in India.
