When assailants armed with guns and explosives stormed an upscale cafe in the Bangladeshi capital Friday, shouting “Allahu akbar,” it marked a sharp escalation by extremist followers of Islamic State in South Asia, a region where the terror group had previously gained little traction.
By the time security forces retook the restaurant after an assault backed by armored vehicles early Saturday, 20 civilians, two police officers and six militants had been killed. Brig. Gen. Nayeem Ashfaq Chowdhury, the army’s director of military operations, said 13 people being held hostage were freed.
Among the dead were two students from Emory University, which is based in Atlanta. Abinta Kabir, a U.S. citizen who was an undergraduate student at the school’s Oxford College campus in Georgia, was killed, along with another student, Faraaz Hossain, spokesmen for their families said Saturday. Mr. Hossain’s nationality hasn’t been confirmed.
Tarushi Jain, an 18-year-old Indian national who attended the University of California-Berkeley, also perished in the attack, the Associated Press reported.
Italy’s Foreign Ministry said nine Italians were among those killed. India said one Indian had died. In Japan, which said seven of its citizens were killed in the attack, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called the attack “cruel and inhumane.”
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. Its news service, Amaq, posted grisly photos that it said were taken during the siege, appearing to show dead bodies, blood-smeared walls and overturned chairs.
Earlier this week, Indian authorities detained 11 men they said had been receiving instructions from an ISIS handler abroad. India’s National Investigation Agency said they were planning to attack Hindu religious sites with improvised explosive devices.
Animesh Roul, executive director of the New Delhi-based Society for the Study of Peace and Conflict, said Bangladesh’s Islamist groups now “appear to be in regular contact” with Islamic State, but he said there was still no evidence the terrorist group was providing “direct, material support” to militants in South Asia.
Islamic State, behind recent attacks in Europe and elsewhere, has sought to ramp up recruiting in South Asia, reaching out to prospective recruits online.
A video purportedly released by Islamic State in May showed fighters of the extremist group saying they would avenge what they called “atrocities” against Muslims in India, which has one of the world’s largest Islamic populations. Gun-wielding men urged Indian Muslims to join ISIS and mocked those who live alongside Hindus.
In neighboring Muslim-majority Bangladesh, police have arrested alleged Islamic State recruiters. A video on a website linked to one of them showed masked men posing with handguns against a backdrop of the black flag of Islamic State.
“Remove atheists and apostates from the face of the earth,” one of the men said in Bangla.
Bangladesh’s government has denied that Islamic State or al Qaeda have footholds in the country and blamed violence on political opponents and an “international conspiracy” to destabilize the country. The government hasn’t said who it believes was responsible for Friday’s assault.
In a televised speech, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said her administration had successfully handled what was an unprecedented terrorist attack in Dhaka. “Terrorists have no religion,” she said. “Our security forces conducted a successful operation and killed almost all of the terrorists. None escaped.”
The last time Bangladesh faced a large-scale terrorist attack was in 2005, when a banned militant group called Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh set off a series of bombs in all but one of Bangladesh’s 64 districts in the space of an hour, killing more than 30 people.
The government at the time captured and hanged JMB leaders. But the organization has regrouped recently and claimed responsibility for dozens of assassinations of religious minorities, secular thinkers and foreigners over the past year.
Last year, Islamic State’s propaganda magazine, Dabiq, endorsed the JMB and said it was the only jihadist group in Bangladesh “with the correct beliefs.” The issue devoted an entire chapter on “the revival of Jihad in Bengal.”
In an effort to suppress domestic jihadist groups, police last month arrested more than 11,000 people. Critics said the mass arrests would do little to pressure extremist groups and that security forces had rounded up petty criminals and many innocent people.
The government has denied innocent people were arrested and pointed to several successes, including the arrest of an Islamist suspected of attacking and injuring a publisher in Dhaka last year.
Still the crackdown failed to prevent Friday’s attackers from answering an Islamic State call for violence during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ends Tuesday. They barged into the Holey Artisan Café, located in an affluent neighborhood near several embassies.
Sumon Reza, a manager at the cafe said he was at work on the second floor just after 9 p.m. local time when two men with rifles burst into the ground floor, spraying the room with gunfire. The two gunmen were quickly joined by five others, one of whom was carrying a sword.
As the gunmen moved through the building, Mr. Reza said he jumped from the roof. “Terrorism is something that happens in far-off places,” he said. “This was an attack in our area, in our place of work.”
Two senior police officers who attempted to negotiate with them died when the militants detonated an explosive device, police said.
A woman, who declined to be named, said her son, daughter-in-law and their two young children had come out of the restaurant shortly before police and soldiers moved in. “They let all the locals go before the police went in,” she said.
Bangladesh has been without an effective opposition in Parliament since opposition groups boycotted elections in 2014, accusing Ms. Hasina of trying to rig them, something she denied. Some experts have warned that a political vacuum in the South Asian country could be aiding the rise of extremism by allowing jihadist groups to recruit from among disgruntled opposition supporters.
The government has so far rejected calls by the opposition to start a national dialogue against militancy, saying it has the situation under control.
Two students from a U.S. university were among those killed in a terrorist assault on a Bangladeshi cafe. An earlier version of this story, and its headline, identified both students as Americans, though family have only confirmed one was a U.S. citizen. Also, Brig. Gen. Nayeem Ashfaq Chowdhury is the Bangladeshi army’s director of military operations. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated his name. (July 2, 2016)
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