Bangladesh

  Bottom Line Up Front Protests continue in India over the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, which provides for expedited citizenship but specifically excludes Muslims. The new law applies to people who entered India before 2014 from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh if they belong to six specified religions. The ...

Bottom Line: As monsoon season bears down on Southeast Asia, U.S. officials say up to a 100,000 Rohingya refugees sheltering in the hills of Bangladesh face a potential humanitarian catastrophe. They are among the 860,000 ethnic Rohingya Muslims driven out of Myanmar by a violent crackdown that the U.S. has ...

Are Bangladesh and Myanmar poised to make progress to address the refugee crisis involving hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya? Maybe. The two countries signed an agreement to repatriate hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who have fled their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine State after the latest wave of violence that ...

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Myanmar is guilty of “ethnic cleansing” in its crackdown on minority Muslim Rohingya, driving more than half a million refugees to neighboring Bangladesh. Although previously restrained in his description of the exodus, Tillerson said he’d concluded the violence warranted further investigation and possibly targeted ...

A major humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in Myanmar, as tens of thousands of people, the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, flee the threat of ethnic cleansing carried out by the country’s government. Rohingya civilians have been the target of village burnings, mass executions, disappearances and rape, according to the United Nations, ...

While al Qaeda’s affiliates in North Africa, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen continue to grab headlines, the terrorist network has surreptitiously expanded eastward, entrenching itself throughout the Indian subcontinent. “Al Qaeda’s reach in South Asia is deeper than what not only the news headlines, but also the U.S. government, may suggest,” explains ...

The Cipher Brief sat down with Michael Kugelman, Deputy Director and Senior Associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, to discuss the threat posed by al Qaeda’s affiliate in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS). According to Kugelman, al Qaeda has managed to “spread its tentacles across the Indian Subcontinent ...

While al Qaeda’s affiliate in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) may be regionally focused, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says “that doesn’t mean AQIS can be divorced from al Qaeda’s aspirations to attack the West.” In an interview with The Cipher Brief, Gartenstein-Ross also said ...

The recent attack at the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka, Bangladesh where 20 people were brutally murdered finally brought international attention to a disturbing trend in one of the world’s largest Muslim countries. For decades, Bangladesh has suffered from an increasing trend in violent extremism from several groups, both domestic ...

The terrorist attack at Holey Bakery in Dhaka earlier this month deviated in important ways from the previous trend of assassination-style attacks against specific individuals in Bangladesh. The perpetrators targeted a group of random individuals, prolonged the attack to maximize media exposure, and engaged in an attack that provided little ...

Earlier this month, after ISIS claimed responsibility for a brazen and bloody assault on a café in Dhaka, Bangladesh, analysts pointed to the attack as more proof of the group’s geographically expanding reign of terror. ISIS’s increasing profile in Bangladesh is certainly cause for concern. The group has minced no ...