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** Washington's Dangerous Courtship with Bangladesh's Islamist Bloc ([link removed])
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by Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury • December 19, 2025 at 5:00 am
* Instead of reinforcing the country's fragile democratic foundations or supporting groups resisting extremism, US officials have embarked on a sweeping outreach campaign to Bangladesh's most powerful Islamist movements -- groups long tied to violence, sectarian hatred, and the darkest chapters of the nation's past. The result is an emerging strategic catastrophe: the legitimization of a coalition that once presided over genocide and now seeks to impose a Taliban-style political order on the world's fourth-largest Muslim-majority nation.
* With Islamists and their partners dominating the polls, these meetings amount to quiet recognition of a looming Islamist ascendancy.
* US officials also met repeatedly with the hardline party Islami Andolan Bangladesh (IAB), which openly vows to enforce sharia law nationwide and says it admires the Taliban model.
* Bangladeshi media report that in 2025 alone, diplomats from at least 35 nations - from the US and UK to China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Japan, and EU states - have sought meetings with Jamaat. Even the group's student wing is reportedly being introduced to Western delegations.
* The Yunus-led interim administration has since allowed extremist actors to regain legitimacy while presiding over intensifying attacks on Hindus, Christians, political opponents, and independent journalists.
* Bangladesh is being pushed toward a destiny shaped not by democratic consensus, but by militant pressure.
* Washington's belief that Jamaat-e-Islami or its Islamist allies can evolve into "responsible stakeholders" mirrors the same strategic delusions that once empowered the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Islamist factions from Yemen to Tunisia.
* The question is no longer whether Bangladesh's future is at risk, but whether Western policymakers are willing to recognize the disaster they are helping to create before it is irreversible.
Pictured: Participants at an Islamist demonstration that drew hundreds of thousands of men, with many carrying the Taliban flag, in Dhaka on May 3, 2025. The rally was held to oppose a proposal to reduce legal discrimination against women. (Photo by Munir Uz Zaman/AFP via Getty Images)
This month, an elderly Hindu couple in Bangladesh were murdered in their home, their throats slit. This week, an Islamist group targeted offices of India's High Commission in Bangladesh, causing India to suspend visa services there.
Bangladesh is standing at the edge of a historic transformation, and, sadly, Washington is taking a perilous gamble.
Instead of reinforcing the country's fragile democratic foundations or supporting groups resisting extremism, US officials have embarked on a sweeping outreach campaign to Bangladesh's most powerful Islamist movements -- groups long tied to violence, sectarian hatred, and the darkest chapters of the nation's past. The result is an emerging strategic catastrophe: the legitimization of a coalition that once presided over genocide and now seeks to impose a Taliban-style political order on the world's fourth-largest Muslim-majority nation.
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