Bangladesh’s descent from cyber jihad to caliphate flags on its streets

On the evening of February 5, 2025, an excavator tore into the walls of Dhanmondi 32, the museum-home where Bangladesh's independence was imagined, a national monument that belonged to every citizen who ever called himself Bangladeshi. A mob had answered social media calls for a “Bulldozer March”, smashed the gates, destroyed the murals and set the building ablaze. Videos that spread across social media that night captured something colder than the demolition: flags associated with Hamas and the Islamic State raised over the wreckage of the nation's founding site. When a jihadist banner flies over the birthplace of a secular republic, the message is not addressed to any politician. It is addressed to 173 million people.

Sixteen months on, the flags have climbed from the rubble to the skyline. Over the past two weeks, rows of Kalema flags have appeared along flyovers, highways and rooftops in Dhaka, Narayanganj, Bogra, Faridpur and other parts of Bangladesh. The Kalema is sacred to every Muslim, which is exactly why it is being exploited. These specific designs are the signature banners of the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Motorcycle convoys parade them. Post-Jumma rallies wave them while demanding Sharia and boycott of India, the United States and Russia. Security analyst Brigadier General (Retd) M Sakhawat Hossain named the danger precisely: the issue is not the Kalema, it is whether symbols internationally tied to terrorist organisations are being deliberately mainstreamed. They are. In daylight. And the state watches.

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What the firewall actually protected

Strip away the propaganda, and Sheikh Hasina's counterterrorism record was never about protecting a government. It was about whether an ordinary Bangladeshi could write a blog post, sing at a Baul mahfil, attend a Baishakhi fair, pray at a mazar, a temple or an Ahmadiyya mosque, or send a daughter to school and to work without being murdered or raped for it.

Remember what the country looked like when the jihadists had momentum. In 2015, machete squads of the Al-Qaeda-linked Ansarullah Bangla Team hacked writer Avijit Roy to death outside the Ekushey Book Fair, then killed blogger after blogger through the year. In July 2016, gunmen of the ISIS-claimed Holey Artisan Bakery attack slaughtered 22 people after sorting hostages by whether they could recite the Quran. Grenades thrown at a public rally in 2004 killed 24 ordinary party workers and wounded hundreds; Hasina survived that blast with permanent hearing damage. She did not learn about jihadist violence from an intelligence briefing. She carried its shrapnel.

Her answer was systematic, and it worked for everyone. The Anti-Terrorism Act of 2009, the banning of Hizb ut-Tahrir the same year, special tribunals, the strangling of terror financing, and relentless operations that dismantled JMB, Neo-JMB and Harkat-ul-Jihad networks. The dividend belonged to the people: between 2017 and 2023, transnational terror incidents fell to effectively zero. Book fairs came back. Pahela Baishakh processions filled the streets. Qawwali nights ran until dawn at shrines that had stood for centuries. Millions of women went to garment factories in a country the extremists insisted women should not work in at all. That was the firewall, and every arsonist under those flags knew exactly what he was burning.

Who is paying now?

Start with the Sufis, the gentlest people in Bangladesh's spiritual landscape. Since August 2024, rights groups have documented more than 100 attacks on Sufi shrines, dargahs and Baul akhras: vandalism, arson, looting, and mobs arriving after Friday prayers. In one case that went viral, a mob exhumed and burnt the body of the saint Nura Pagla, buried just two weeks earlier, and killed one of his followers. In April, spiritual leader Shamim Reza was beaten and hacked to death at his own shrine in Kushtia over a blasphemy rumour; of nearly a hundred incidents, barely a dozen cases have been formally registered. A 200-year-old shrine in Mymensingh was stormed by hundreds of madrasa students during its Urs and qawwali festival. Across the country, khadems report that mahfils and devotional music have simply been suspended out of fear. Eight centuries of Bengali syncretism are being silenced shrine by shrine, and the silence is the point.

Then the minorities and the secular, pro-liberation forces. A UN report in early 2025 documented widespread abuses against Hindu, Ahmadiyya and indigenous communities after the uprising, with most perpetrators enjoying impunity. Just last week, the arrest of a Hindu youth over a Facebook post was followed by mobs vandalising homes and temples. Sculptures and memorials of the Liberation War have been systematically desecrated, an open attempt to erase the secular founding story of 1971 itself. And the political workers who carried that story paid in their own blood and liberty: party offices torched in August 2024, activists lynched by mobs, and a crackdown named “Operation Devil Hunt” that arrested more than 12,000 people within weeks, overwhelmingly supporters of the ousted party. During the Bulldozer March itself, a mob attack on a former minister's home left one man dead. Whatever one thinks of any party, this is collective punishment of the pro-liberation half of a nation. When women's rights campaigners tried to push modest equality reforms in May 2025, Islamists flooded the streets, and the proposals stalled. Bloggers, Bauls, Hindus, Ahmadiyyas, women, freedom fighters' families, party workers: the list of the punished is simply a census of secular Bangladesh.

What replaced the firewall?

The answer arrived within days of the fall in August 2024. More than 700 prisoners escaped, including at least 470 known militants. Roughly 5,800 looted firearms and 300,000 rounds of ammunition are still missing. Jashimuddin Rahmani, the Al-Qaeda-linked Ansarullah Bangla Team chief whose followers hacked secular bloggers to death with machetes, walked out on bail and immediately resumed threatening India and courting Pakistan.

Then came March 2025, when Hizb ut-Tahrir, still legally banned, marched thousands of supporters from Baitul Mukarram Mosque chanting “Muktir ek poth, Khilafat, Khilafat.” A proscribed terror organisation held a caliphate rally at the national mosque in broad daylight. It has since built a student wing at Dhaka University, hosted an international online Khilafah conference, and papered Gulshan with posters, including outside the police station that memorialises officers killed by ISIS in 2016. The street belongs to them now, and the street knows it.

The pipeline runs outward too. Bangladeshi nationals have been killed fighting alongside Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan in Afghanistan-Pakistan border operations. In June 2025, Malaysian authorities arrested 36 Bangladeshis running ISIS recruitment and financing cells, wiring money to Syria through e-wallets. In December 2025, police pulled 250 kilograms of bomb-making material from a Dhaka madrasa after an explosion injured women and children. This is no longer a Bangladeshi problem. It is a South Asian and global one.

The other battlefield: Who owns the truth?

The capture of the streets has a digital twin, quieter and more corrosive. Facebook is Bangladesh's public square, and whoever decides what gets flagged, restricted and deleted there decides what 173 million people are allowed to know. Secular and progressive users increasingly describe the same sequence: coordinated mass-reporting swarms, sudden account restrictions and takedowns of posts documenting extremist violence, while caliphate content circulates untouched. Even the referees are at war with each other: fact-checkers now publicly accuse rivals of spreading rumours in the name of fact-checking, as in the disputed Turag killing. When the machinery of verification becomes contested territory, the label “fact-check” stops being a shield and becomes a weapon.

This is textbook grey-zone strategy. Hizb ut-Tahrir's documented method was never primarily bombs but institutional infiltration: universities, professional bodies, the officer corps, and now, plausibly, the arbitration of online truth. Call it 'cyber jihad' or 'algorithmic capture'; the effect is identical. The flags on the flyovers announce in daylight what the takedown campaigns achieve in the dark: the shrinking of the space where a secular Bangladeshi can safely speak. Meta owes the public transparency about who its local gatekeepers are, how they are funded, and which direction their errors consistently fall.

The warning

A firewall is invisible when it works. Nobody thanks the wall for the fires that never spread. For fifteen years, the everyday freedoms of Bangladeshis, the blogger's keyboard, the garment worker's wage, the qawwali singer's night, the Hindu festival, and the girl's classroom rested on a security architecture that was dismantled in a single week in August 2024. Every month since has revealed what it was holding back: freed terrorists, missing rifles, caliphate marches, a hundred burning shrines, terrorised minorities, hunted party workers, and now the flags of the Islamic State (ISIS) and Hamas are normalised on public roads. Sheikh Hasina spent her career warning that she stood between her people and precisely this, and she is paying for that but still fighting against it in exile while the people she shielded pay for it at home, street by street, shrine by shrine, post by post. The question for Dhaka, Delhi and Washington is no longer whether the fire has started. It is how much of the neighbourhood they are prepared to let it consume.

(Abu Obaidha Arin is a Bangladeshi thinker and writer focused on politics, governance, and the societal impact of digital systems. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)