A twilight tangle spawns many unanswered questions
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Shahid Islam
The conveyor of night darkness is the flicker of lights that dot the horizon after every sunlit days. It’s quixotic for some who savour to witness twinkling stars and a cheese-coloured moon while the dark gloom of the nightfall slowly blankets the universe. For ordinary folks, retreat to the slumber and a long spell of rest is what the twilight beacons.
Bangladesh is a land of light and shadow, of cloak and dagger mischief, of living through the uncertainty of randomly being struck by thunder or by a ‘killer Tata truck,’ and of being arrested or kidnapped any time as helpless victim accused of committing anti-government crimes.
Evolving story
Amidst the interplays of such lights and shadows, hope and despair, the police cordoned a house in Sylhet’s Shibbari area in the wee hours of March 23 to nab some suspected Islamic militants who, according to the government, have mushroomed and sprawled across various parts of the country under the ‘patronage of BNP - Jamat nexus.’ Worth reminding that, for years, such a narrative has spawned many stories that are still being scripted, still evolving.
According to reports, police invited the alleged Shibbari militants to surrender and ordered residents of a five story building, and an adjacent four story one too, to stay in door. The residents numbering over 70, as was seen after the army’s para military commandos brought them out over 30 hours later, were not hostage as claimed. They were involuntarily confined people ordered by police to stay in door.
Police sources told some media outlets that the militants holed up in the ground floor of the house refused to surrender and invited Special Weapon and Tactic (SWAT), an elite counter terrorism unit of the police, to come and fight them. By then RAB soldiers had joined the police and a SWAT team from Dhaka dashed to the scene immediately.
Operation twilight
What followed is biblical in its vivacity. Despite police being seen in video footage on the roof top of the building on March 24, subsequent narrative by law enforces described the target as booby trapped and Improvised Explosive Device (IED) – infested, hence not safe to enter. On March 25, para commando soldiers of the army moved in and launched ‘operation twilight’; the very first undertaking of the team being to rescue the inmates from the buildings who were surprisingly branded as ‘hostage’ by the army spokesperson, Brig. Gen. Fakhrul Ahsan.
The army commandos launched their operation at about 9.30 AM on Saturday, March 25, prior to which the mass media reporters were told to fall back one kilometer away from the operation venue. Locals reported of intermittent gunshots and bomb blasts since the operation’s commencement, which, according to locals, were fired mostly by the raiding commandos. Sounds of grenade and RR blasts also ricocheted now and then, some of which, according to the gist of the second military briefing on March 26, at 5.30 PM, came from the ‘well-trained militants’ hurling back the very grenades lobbed at them by the army.
Counter-attack
The spectacle turned nightmarish after what seemed like a counter attack, or a false flag operation by some quarter with conspiratorial political intent, within minutes of the army spokesperson’s press briefing on March 25, and his intimation and rationalization of the operation’s continuation.
As two separate attacks wreaked havoc on police, security forces and, curiously, some ruling party activists, barely 200 yards from the building where the operation twilight progressed, the balance of force was in the drift; due mainly to the attacks having devastating impact: killing six on the spot, including two police officers, and injuring seriously two RAB officers of the ranks of Lt. Col. and Major, as well as over 40 others, many of whom are learnt to be members of security forces.
Amidst this chaos, the nation celebrated the Independence Day on March 26 and kept an eye open on how the operation twilight progressed. Brig-Gen Fakhrul said during his March 26 press briefing:
“The operation continues.” By then, over 48 hours had elapsed since the police cordoned the house on Thursday night. Brig-Gen Fakhrul also told the media that two of the militants were killed and one or more militants were still holed up in the building. He said the building and its stairs were booby trapped; the militant possessed small arms; and they were well trained. The risks posed necessitated the operation’s continuation to the next day, he concluded.
Curiously, it was not until the noon hours of Saturday that an army officer objected to the media’s portrayal of the operation as a jointly launched one with RAB and SWAT. “It’s an exclusively army-run operation,” he told the media before the reporters were whisked away from the scene.
Muffling truth
Given that police had moved to the target on the night of March 23 with specific information, urged the militants to surrender, and told the inhabitants to stay in door, the media had the right to know much more from the police, which did not happen. Trails of unconvincing anecdotes thus cropped up; the cordoning of the target leaving no one in doubt that police had prior knowledge of the enemy’s strength, capability and other operation-centric inputs. At this point, insightful observers were left with little doubt that truth was being twisted and dissemination muffled.
As of now, why the inmates were told to stay indoors is not clear; in the backdrop of police not expecting the militants’ surrender without a fight. Conversely, if such an order would have led to some of the inmates being taken as hostage by the militants, was there a way out of such collateral dangers?
Meanwhile, the media became the virtual hostage to the crisis, unable to report from the spot or its vicinity, and waiting 12 hours each day to get an army briefing. During the March 27 briefing, Brig-Gen Fakhrul said two more militants were killed and there seemed no other militants left alive in the den. He also said operation would continue due to IED and other dangers barring a full mopping up.
Yet, from the briefings rendered by army spokesman Brig-Gen Fakhrul, one can surmise that someone tactically and strategically suave seemed to have been in command of the Sylheti militant outfit who had managed to keep the nation’s best fighting forces at bay for over five days, launch counter attacks to break the law enforcers’ morale, display the temerity to hit back, and, keep the nation and the world transfixed at their acts of audacious defiance.
More worrying is the claim by the Islamic State (IS) that the militants belong to their own outfit, adding more toxicity to the texture of an operation that had consigned local people and the economy hostage for days.
Unanswered questions
The twilight tangle ended on Tuesday, March 28, leaving unanswered many crucial questions. After 5 days of high profiled operations by the army’s elite forces, inexplicable suffering of the locals due to imposition of section 144 and, disconnection of gas and electricity, and yet, the alleged militants not nabbed alive, little difference is visible if the militants were stormed and killed on the very first day following evacuation of the inmates and, killing them four days later. A faster action would have spared the locals of immense suffering and deprive the militants billion dollar worth of national and global publicity by keeping the issue alive for five days.
Many other unanswered questions stem from the facts that the Sylhet standoff was not the one where the militants struck with surprise on law enforcers from a residential building and made the residents hostage. Quite the opposite. Police in this instance had moved in to surprise the militants and ordered the residents to stay in door. If the stairs were IED-smeared or booby trapped, how the police went to the roof top on March 24?
More importantly, the assertion that the operation couldn’t be terminated on Monday due to two of the dead militants having suicidal vest on them doesn’t make sense. If they died activating their suicide vest, there are no active vests posing further risks. If they’re killed by sniper shot or splinter, the vest too had activated.
And, how the two bombers launched their counter attacks ‘by leaving within the cordoned area explosion laden bags that had killed six and injured forty others, according to Sylhet police’s additional commissioner Rokonuddin, remains a mystery.
Innovation or pressure?
Moreover, given the cost and gain of this operation, the breaching of conventionalism seems to have had fatal consequences. Conventionally, the draining out four militants from an empty building should have been an operation conducted with lightning swiftness and surgical precision; especially after the army commandos took charge. The staggering of it was an innovation that seemed to have been imposed from the power that be.
This proved costly. The timing and surprise being the very essence of any such military foray, the delay and the dithering offered time to the militants to strike back, to deny the law enforcers the element of surprise, and to claim back a venerable political spot that the political Islamists were deemed to have lost after their marginalization in recent years through exaction of brutal force and extra-judicial killings. Agree or not, Bangladesh has begun to pay the price of political exclusion, arrogance, and exclusivity; and of one-party autocracy which people can’t take any more.
