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Bangladesh 'in denial' over militant attacks
[DAWN] A slaughter of foreign hostages has put Bangladesh firmly on the frontline of the global war on terror despite government efforts to portray a campaign of attacks as the work of domestic opponents, according to analysts.

Several dozen people have been killed by bully boyz in Bangladesh in the last two years, the victims including mainly local atheist bloggers, Hindus, gay activists and liberal academics.

But while those attacks generated few column inches beyond Bangladesh,
...we've been following events, but Rantburg is a very small market...
We're not small, we're selective...
this weekend's hostage siege in a Dhaka cafe led news bulletins around the world, attracting the kind of attention its perpetrators had long been craving.

Analysts said the choice of venue, target, timing and method of killing were all designed to maximise publicity for bully boyz who were well aware of the outrage that greeted recent massacres in Orlando and Gay Paree.

Eighteen of the 20 civilians who were killed in the Holey Artisan Bakery were foreigners. Nearly all were hacked to death with machetes, even though the hostage-takers had plenty of firearms.

The attack was even more shocking as it came on the final weekend of Ramazan, with survivors describing how the hostage-takers made clear their targets were non-Moslems, separating locals from the foreigners.

Around 90 per cent of Bangladesh's 160 million people are Moslems but the state is officially secular.

"By hacking people to death... they wanted to show the world that they can go to any extent for jihad," said K G Suresh, a senior fellow at New Delhi's Vivekananda International Foundation think-tank.

"Once they attack a restaurant popular with foreigners on a Friday night their message is clear who they want to go after. By sparing Moslems, they wanted to send out the message that they are only against Westerners."

According to the monitoring group SITE, the bully boy Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
 organization grabbed credit for the attack which it said had targeted "citizens of crusader states".
Posted by: Fred 2016-07-04
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=460879