By Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury
A spectre is gathering strength inside Bangladesh – not in whispered rumors but in open social-media proclamations, organizational directives and public speeches. What began as campus agitation and partisan mobilization has, according to a string of posts and statements now circulating online, moved rapidly toward paramilitary reality: the creation of an “Islamic Revolutionary Army” (IRA) – a militia force being assembled under the patronage of forces loyal to Muhammad Yunus and backed by foreign intelligence ties. Such project is not simply an internal security concern; it is a regional threat that risks inflaming communal violence, exporting terror to neighboring countries and triggering a dangerous cycle of proxy warfare across South Asia.
The first public trace of this alarming plan came on October 20, 2025, in a social-media post by Asif Mahmud Shojib Bhuiain – an influential adviser in the Yunus regime – which declared the initial scope of the program: 8,850 recruits will be trained at seven centers across the country in martial arts and firearms.
It is learnt from a source that multiple batches, recruited through written, oral and physical examinations, would be shepherded by pro-Pakistani retired military personnel and covert representatives from Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) and Turkey’s Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı (MIT), with some recruits to be sent abroad for “advanced commando” and espionage training. Such a structure – open recruitment, organized training centers, and foreign specialist involvement – is functionally indistinguishable from the early stages of paramilitary formation elsewhere in the region.
These developments did not spring up overnight. The “Anti-Discrimination Student Movement” – a campus-centered Islamist platform closely aligned with Yunus loyalists – openly announced on December 20, 2024, that it would begin formation of an armed militia under the banner of the “Islamic Revolutionary Army”, calling on youths to gather at Dhaka University for initial recruitment and training. The public Facebook advisory described a staged training regimen: three days of martial-arts instruction followed by a month of military-style training conducted “by army and paramilitary forces”. Such an explicit, public plan for militarizing student networks is without precedent in modern Bangladeshi civic movements and must be treated with the utmost seriousness.
Compounding the danger, public speeches by Jamaat-e-Islami leaders have taken on an openly militaristic and revanchist tone. On September 27, 2025, Dr. Syed Abdullah Muhammad Taher, the party’s Nayeb-e-Ameer, told a gathering in New York that millions of Jamaat’s youth were ready to “fight for independence” against India.
Muhammad Taher further said, “many say there is a risk of an attack from India if Jamaat comes to power. I would say, we are praying that happens. If India enters Bangladesh, bad name that was imposed on us in 1971 will be whipped-off. We shall get a chance to prove ourselves as true freedom fighters. One part of five million Jamaat youth will participate in the guerilla war, while the rest will be spread over a wide area [inside India] and implement Ghazwa-e-Hind”.
Whether these are rhetorical flourishes or veiled incitements, they create an ideological canopy under which organized violence can be legitimized and recruited. Regional audiences – particularly in India and Myanmar – cannot afford to dismiss such declarations as mere hyperbole.
More worrying still are persistent, corroborated reports that Pakistan’s intelligence and special-operations apparatus have been active inside Bangladesh. Investigative pieces and intelligence-sourced stories allege that, as early as September 2023, Pakistani Special Services Group (SSG) operatives were implicated in training cadres drawn from extremist groups and the so-called “Stranded Pakistanis” community; further accounts place Pakistani officers in Dhaka in late 2024 to assist with more recent training efforts. Whether the reports fully capture the scale of cooperation or conflate different streams of influence, the pattern is clear: external actors with long histories of proxy warfare in the region have motive and, according to multiple sources, opportunity to assist in the formation of irregular forces inside Bangladesh.
Last year, a leader of Pakistan’s ruling Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N), Irshad Ahmed Khan, publicly admitted on a major Indian broadcast network that Pakistan is smuggling weapons concealed in commercial goods sent to Bangladesh via direct vessels from Karachi Port.
What is being organized bears the classic hallmarks of a proxy militia: mass mobilization of disaffected youth, a doctrinal narrative that frames violence as redemption or liberation, organized training camps, external specialist support, and a target set that includes minorities and neighboring states. Documents and posts that promise infiltration training to operate in India, Nepal, Myanmar and Western countries suggest an ambition that reaches beyond domestic politics and into cross-border destabilization and espionage. If operatives are indeed being prepared to “embed” inside foreign societies, the consequences – from communal pogroms to transnational terrorism and diplomatic crises – could be catastrophic.
The immediate security and human-rights ramifications are grave. Internally, an organized militia loyal to a political faction threatens to become an instrument for sectarian cleansing, intimidation and extrajudicial violence – particularly against religious minorities and political opponents. Bangladesh’s fragile communal balance would be placed under intolerable strain. Externally, the exporting of trained militants would aggravate already-tense relations with India and Myanmar, invite cross-border countermeasures, and possibly provoke retaliatory operations that would entangle Bangladesh in a broader regional conflict.
There are also legal and moral dimensions that cannot be ignored. Recruitment and training of irregular fighters – especially when aimed at overseas operations or targeting civilian populations – contravenes international norms and may amount to crimes under international humanitarian law. Any credible evidence of state or quasi-state involvement in such activities obliges both national authorities and the international community to investigate and, where necessary, act. Such actions would place Bangladesh at the center of a proxy theatre that destabilizes South Asia and undermines global counterterrorism efforts.
(The writer is an award-winning journalist, writer, and Editor of the newspaper Blitz)
