Kunio Hoshi's Murder Of ISIS

Summer has ended in Bangladesh, but terrorism continues to heat up the country. On October 24, a Shia shrine in Dhaka was bombed on the day of Ashura, leaving one dead and over a hundred injured. A few weeks earlier, Kunio Hoshi, an elderly Japanese citizen, was gunned down in Rangpur district.

His murder came a few days after Cesare Tavella’s, an Italian aid worker sprayed with bullets in Dhaka’s diplomatic neighborhood. Police sources reported that five homemade bombs were used to target the Ashura rally, while both Hoshi and Tavella fell to “three masked men who came by motorcycle and used a pistol.”

The SITE Intelligence Group, a jihadist watchdog focused on online snooping and sometimes employed by the US government, revealed that Islamic
In August 2015, a video of the Afghan ISIS surfaced online showing blindfolded prisoners getting blown up by planted explosives. Moreover, in classic ISIS fashion, the militants were shown riding on horses across green hills in the early morning fog for dramatic effect.

In Bangladesh’s case, there is a rhetorical commonality between the Middle Eastern ISIS and its supposed local faction. Hoshi and Tavella were ostensibly murdered because they were citizens of the “crusader coalition.” Furthermore, the Dhaka Ashura rally was bombed because the mourners were “polytheists” holding “polytheistic rituals.”

In many ways, it is not surprising that domestic militancy has risen during the Awaami League’s (AL) years in office. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajid is an avowed secularist, who opponents often accuse of using the Islamist card to scaremonger the public into voting for her. Hasina has also gone after alleged war criminals with a vengeance, many of whom include leaders of Bangladesh’s Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami (JI)
Four secular bloggers were subsequently hacked to death as payback. These killings were initially claimed by Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), but law enforcement officials later pinned them on local militant outfits Ansarullah Bangla Team and Ansar-ul-Islam.

Political sabotage, the second possible reason for rising terrorism in Bangladesh, has its roots in Hasina’s autocratic rule. Longtime rival Khalida Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is the prime suspect but most of Hasina’s political opponents and the free press are chafing under her dictatorship. Mahfuz Anam, editor of Dhaka’s Daily Star newspaper, recently explained to a British interviewer: “I think you have a phrase for the prime minister in the UK? First among equals. Here it’s different. Hasina is first. No equals.”

Zia’s hand in recent events, however, cannot be dismissed for obvious reasons. Her bitter political rivalry with Hasina stretches back over two decades and Zia led the opposition boycott of the 2014 election for fears of rigging. Hasina, who therefore cakewalked to victory, thinks Zia is now trying to discredit her government and blames the BNP for “supporting terrorism and launching killing sprees across