On August 10, the United Nations Security Council released a report that raised “concern about AQIS [al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent] trying to exploit Bangladesh to establish cells there.”

Although the U.N. report mentioned Bangladesh in only one sentence, it triggered enormous and somewhat surprising media coverage in Bangladesh, with several news publications drawing attention to Muslim radicalism in the country. Police also swung into action. They instructed field-level police to “remain on high alert.”

In recent months, Bangladesh Police have pointed to an upsurge in militant activities in the country. In June 2026, they issued a terror alert, warning of an attack on the Police headquarters. Media reports from last year drew attention to Bangladeshi nationals joining the Tehreek‑e‑Taliban Pakistan (TTP). On August 12, police found a handmade pressure‑cooker bomb in Dhaka’s Savar area.

Bangladesh’s response to militancy has swung between extremes. The Sheikh Hasina regime securitized dissent itself, most visibly when it banned the opposition-aligned Jamaat-e-Islami as a terrorist organization just days before Hasina’s ouster. It used the “Islamist terrorism threat” to marginalize the opposition and crack down on dissent. This served to secure external legitimacy and approval for its dictatorial rule — a dynamic I find paradoxical. In over a decade of experience tracking Muslim radicalization in Bangladesh, I have seen how militancy was manipulated rather than confronted.

In the two years since the ouster of the Hasina regime in August 2024, Bangladesh’s response to militancy has been confused, oscillating between denial — Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed publicly insisted that militancy “no longer exists in the country” — and exaggerated responses, such as the April 2026 police alert warning of an imminent attack on their own headquarters, an attack that never materialized.

Broadly, Bangladesh’s terrorist landscape has comprised three streams: the Taliban inspired Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), the Islamic State-affiliated Neo-JMB, and al-Qaida-linked Ansar Al Islam (AAI). While JMB recruits are largely Qwami madrasa students, Neo-JMB and AAI have drawn their recruits largely from urban educated youths.

There are operational differences as well. While JMB and AAI target secular bloggers and Sufi shrines, Neo-JMB has attacked foreigners, mainly Westerners, describing them as crusaders or Christians.

JMB lost much of its operational capacity after the government executed several of its leaders, including Bangla Bhai and Abdur Rahman, in 2007. However, it remains active, though it continues to be decentralized. Triggers such as a political or religious flashpoint could be used by JMB to justify escalating from recruitment and fundraising alone to actual violence.

Neo‑JMB, meanwhile, lost momentum following the collapse of Islamic State’s caliphate and the killing of Abu Bakr al‑Baghdadi by U.S. forces. ISIS’s pitch to young Bangladeshis was explicitly global: a restored caliphate, an apocalyptic showdown with the “Dajjal” (the Islamic equivalent of the anti-Christ), and a single Qurashi imam (a person who leads prayers in a mosque) commanding the loyalty of the entire ummah (global community of Muslims). When Baghdadi’s caliphate collapsed territorially and he was killed in 2019, that pitch lost its anchor. The promise of a caliphate had been rendered false and it had visibly failed, thereby undermining ISIS’s ideological foundation and contributing to its decline. It had ripple effects; it weakened the Neo-JMB’s appeal.

As for the AQIS-linked AAI, it gained ground with the decline of the Neo‑JMB. However, its growth has been slow and steady. AAI received a boost when its leader, Mahmudul Hasan Gunobi, who had been jailed in 2021 over an alleged plot targeting Bangladesh’s parliament, was acquitted in 2024. Gunobi has since rebuilt his public following; he now has over 168,000 followers on Facebook, delivers sermons that invoke “global jihad and the caliphate,” and has openly endorsed “Talibani rule” for Bangladesh. Such developments point to AQIS’s ongoing efforts at recruitment, albeit in a restrained and gradual manner.

The clearest articulation of AQIS’s post-2024 strategy came from Ustadh Usama Mahmood, in a statement issued through As-Sahab Media addressed to Bangladesh’s “religious community” after Hasina’s ouster in August 2024. He laid out what amounts to a four-part doctrine: embrace da’wah (mass preaching) as the primary vehicle; build “capability for resistance and revolution”; use that capability to pressure the state into reform from outside; and, pointedly, avoid entering government altogether. The document frames electoral or bureaucratic participation as a trap that has historically neutered Islamist movements from Cairo to Islamabad, and argues instead for a long, patient movement-building strategy, deepening roots in the population rather than contesting power directly.

This is where AQIS diverges from its old rivals, Neo-JMB and JMB. AQIS’s Bangladeshi messaging has always been layered onto grievances that don’t expire with a battlefield defeat: the plight of Rohingya refugees, the war in Kashmir, the treatment of Muslims under India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, and a steady drumbeat of domestic complaints about “moral degradation,” secular education policy, and what its Bengali-language magazine Al Balagh and English-language Azan and Resurgence have long portrayed as the marginalization of Muslim identity within Bangladesh’s own state institutions. Because these grievances are renewable, AQIS’s narrative infrastructure survives organizational setbacks in a way that ISIS’s did not.

The big question is whether AQIS is on the brink of engaging in violent operations in Bangladesh. At least for now, the answer leans toward a “no.” AQIS has shown patience, and that patience is exactly why a large‑scale campaign of violence is unlikely in the near future, whatever the U.N.’s warning about cell formation might suggest.

Al‑Qaida’s global network still feeds off crises in Gaza, Iran, Yemen, and the Sahel. But none of these has yet produced a militant formation with a clear, actionable mandate for South Asia. Ghazwa‑e‑Hind remains more of a theological promise than an operational plan. Inside Bangladesh, the militant scene is fractured into AAI, JMB, and Neo-JMB, but none has shown the coordination needed for a serious offensive.

Where the danger feels more immediate is in the case of individual dissent. Between 2013 and 2016, AQIS’s Bangladeshi affiliates built their reputation by targeting atheist bloggers, secular publishers, and academics. Avijit Roy, Faisal Arefin Deepan, and others were murdered for their writings judged offensive to Islam. Amid AQIS’s renewed confidence in post-2024 Bangladesh, the risk is that critics of religious orthodoxy, and minority rights advocates could once again face intimidation — even if the country does not see a return to mass‑casualty attacks.