Tag: InternationalNews

{The arrests were part of an undercover operation dubbed Spider II that targets photos of women without head covering.}

At least eight people have been arrested in Iran in a crackdown on women posing for fashion photos online without a headscarf, Iranian media report.

Monday’s arrests included seven female models allegedly involved in posting on the photo-sharing platform Instagram, according to Khabar Online news website.

The state media’s television report included footage of model Elham Arab, known for her portraits in wedding dresses, speaking before Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi in a conference room, her blonde hair hidden under a black chador.

“All people love beauty and fame,” Arab said. “They would like to be seen, but it is important to know what price they will pay to be seen.”

The report did not say what charges Arab faced, nor did it identify the other seven people arrested. It said police identified about 170 people in the operation through social media activity as being involved in modeling, including 58 models, 59 photographers and make-up artists.

It said those targeted saw their businesses shut down, as well as their pages on Instagram and Facebook removed.

“We must fight with enemy’s actions in this area,” Dowlatabadi was quoted by the state-owned IRAN newspaper as saying. “Of course our actions in this area will continue.”

Spider II

The arrests were part of an undercover operation dubbed Spider II which targets photos of women without the head covering that has been mandatory in Iran for more than three decades.

The government of President Hassan Rouhani is not strict in enforcing the head covering rule, but hardliners in the country’s police and judiciary consider exposed hair as un-Islamic.

In recent years, Iranian women in Tehran especially increasingly have worn the mandatory scarf loosely on their head, drawing the ire of conservatives in the Islamic Republic.

Tehran police chief General Hossein Sajedinia in April announced his department had deployed 7,000 male and female officers for a new plain clothes division – the largest such undercover assignment in memory – to enforce the government-mandated Islamic dress code.

{Han Kang’s allegorical tale wins literary prize, which for the first time will be split evenly with the translator.}

South Korean author Han Kang has won the Man Booker International Prize, sharing the £50,000 ($72,000) award with her translator – who had only taught herself Korean three years before.

Han Kang, 45, an author and creative writing teacher who is already successful in South Korea, is likely to enjoy a spike in international sales following the win for her book, The Vegetarian.

“I’m so honoured” she told AFP news agency. “The work features a protagonist who wants to become a plant, and to leave the human race to save herself from the dark side human nature.

“Through this extreme narrative I felt I could question … the difficult question of being human.”

She is the first South Korean to win the prize.

Described as “lyrical and lacerating” by chairman of the judges Boyd Tonkin, the tale traces the story of an ordinary woman’s rejection of convention from three different perspectives.

It was picked unanimously by the panel of five judges, beating six other novels including The Story of the Lost Child, by Italian sensation Elena Ferrante, and A Strangeness in My Mind, by Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk.

“This is a book of tenderness and terror,” Boyd told guests at the award ceremony dinner at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

{{Translation recognition}}

For the first time this year, the award went jointly to the translator, Deborah Smith, 28, who only started learning Korean three years before she embarked on the translation.

“This was the first book that I ever translated, and the best possible thing that can happen to a translator has just happened to me,” she said.

“When I was 22, I decided to teach myself Korean … I felt that I was limited by only being able to speak English. I’d always read a lot of translations, and you get the sense of this whole world being out there, very different perspectives, different stories,” she said.

“It felt as though I looked up almost every other word in the dictionary. It felt a bit like climbing a mountain. But at the same time just falling into this world that was so atmospheric and disturbing and moving – it was a wonderful experience.”

The international edition of Britain’s Man Booker Prize was introduced in 2005 and up to now has been awarded in recognition of a body of work by a living author whose work was written or available in English.

But from this year, it will be presented annually for a single work of fiction that has been translated into English and published in Britain.

{Trump, popular for his Islamophobic comments, has a backer who is a Muslim, Arab and an immigrant as well.}

Everything about Kamal Nawash indicates he would be Donald Trump’s least-likely backer: Muslim, Arab and an immigrant.

But ask the Washington DC lawyer about the presumptive Republican nominee – who has threatened to ban all Muslims from entering the country – and he sounds like he pulled a page right out of the Trump playbook.

“He’s [Trump] telling people that are used to being bosses, ‘f— you, I’ve been a boss all my life and I’m going to be a boss even over you,” says Nawash, 46, referring to the candidate’s approach to the political establishment.

Opinion: Donald Trump and electing Islamophobia

Meet the Muslim-American backing Donald J Trump for President of the United States.

The story of Nawash is about as American as they come. Born in the Occupied West Bank town of Bethlehem to Palestinian parents, his father wanted a better life for his children.

“One big thing for him wasn’t really money,” says Nawash, now a father of two children himself.

“It was to get us a good education.”

Nawash’s father chose the United States. More specifically, he chose New Orleans, Louisiana.

Nawash was nine-year-old when his parents brought their five children to the US. A sixth sibling would be born in America.

American dream

The family opened a grocery store in a poor neighbourhood, a very common thing for many new immigrants to do at the time.

“The crime was much higher but the profits were much higher,” recalls Nawash, who worked there as a stock boy and butcher.

Decades later, he is living the American dream. Nawash is an immigration lawyer who runs his own practice that sits just a half block from K street in Washington DC, one of the most prestigious postal codes in the United States.

It’s an area where the powerful converge – attorneys, politicians and lobbyists – to craft legislation, discuss policy or advocate on behalf of multibillion dollar clients.

Not surprisingly, given where he works, he is obsessed with politics. That’s what brought him to Washington 20 years ago after a life-changing family trip.

And in this election cycle, Nawash has found his candidate.

“I respect people who understand how to make a deal,” Nawash says of Trump, a former reality show host and property mogul.

A demonstrator reacts during a protest against Trump, outside the Trump Tower building in Midtown Manhattan in New York [Reuters]
“Most of these other politicians don’t know how to make a deal.”

Nawash has been a card-carrying Republican since 1988, attracted to the party by President Ronald Reagan whose smaller government, pull-up-your-bootstraps message resonated with him.

Anti-war sentiments

But the US-led Iraq War, launched by former US President George W Bush following the 9/11 terror attacks, made him uncomfortable.

“I just thought it was wrong all around,” he says of the military campaign.

“That didn’t shake my belief in the party, but afterwards I started questioning our party leaders.”

So did the rest of the country, adds Nawash, who blames the Republican establishment’s myopic view of that conflict for the rise and eventual election of Barack Obama to the country’s highest office in 2008.

So, last year, when candidate Trump echoed those anti-war sentiments – bucking the Republican view that the Iraq War was justified – and openly criticised Bush, Nawash felt the party had found their nominee.

“The fact that he said that shows a certain level of independence,” says Nawash.

“I liked that.”

Likewise, when Trump stood before an audience of prominent Jewish Republicans in Washington DC in December and refused to declare Jerusalem the undisputed capital of Israel, Nawash was equally impressed.

“It made me respect him,” he adds.

“The fact he didn’t lie and actually told his true feelings to a group where it’s unpopular.”

But his backing for Trump raises obvious questions.

‘Never Trump’ campaign

How does a Muslim immigrant support a man who has said that he would put a ban on people like him if he were elected to the White House?

In December, Trump ignited a controversy – that continues to this day – after two suspects shot up a San Bernardino, California government centre killing 14 people.

Both suspects – who died during a standoff with police afterwards – were reportedly Muslim.

Less than a week later, Trump issued a public statement, “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”.

“He never said, ‘I want a ban on all Muslims’”, argues Nawash.

“He said, ‘Let’s look at this in light of the terrorist attacks’.”

As a lawyer, Nawash believes a policy like that would never actually happen. Rather, the statement helped Trump win votes during the primaries.

“It kept him in the news,” Nawash says. “It gave him two extra weeks in the news cycle.”

He also argues that Trump was merely saying what the US is already doing, even if they aren’t publicly admitting it: vetting, much more closely, potential immigrants from Middle Eastern countries.

In spite of Trump’s statements about Muslims, Nawash doesn’t consider himself unique.

Protestors hold up a sign towards the crowd at a rally for Donald Trump at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma on January 20 [Reuters]
“Never Trump” campaign

The Arab and Muslim community in the US is a diverse group, he points out, and he has met others who back Trump.

A survey in February conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that 7.5 percent of registered Muslim voters would cast their ballot for Trump, versus almost 52 percent for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

“Mr Nawash is the first Arab-American I know of that would be supporting Mr Trump,” argues David Ramadan, a former Virginia State Delegate who is originally from Lebanon and describes Nawash as “a one-man show” and “outlier”.

Referring to Trump as “fascistic”, Ramadan adds the Republican presumptive nominee represents “everything immigrants left behind in the Middle East”.

Ramadan has suspended his membership of the Republican Party as a result and joined the “Never Trump” campaign to prevent him from being elected.

The backlash doesn’t bother Nawash.

Still, he admits Trump’s comments on Muslims won’t help him in the months ahead.

“I would be satisfied if he never mentions it again,” adds Nawash.

{Azerbaijan says its soldier killed as a result of truce violation by Armenia after two countries agreed for peace talks.}

Azerbaijan’s defence ministry said that one of its soldier was killed near the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region as a result of a ceasefire violation after Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents agreed on the need for a truce.

Azerbaijan’s military forces responded to the Armenian attack and there were casualties on the other side as a result, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency reported on Tuesday.

The agency quoting Azerbaijani defence ministry said that the dead soldier’s name was Natig Tahirli.

Armenian President Serzh Sargisian and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev agreed on the need for a ceasefire and a peaceful settlement to the conflict, according to a joint statement by the United States, France and Russia on Monday.

The two leaders also agreed at a meeting in Vienna that they would fix the time and place of their next meeting in June and that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) would quickly finalise a plan to monitor the ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh, the statement said.

“The presidents reiterated their commitment to the ceasefire and the peaceful settlement of the conflict,” it said.

“To reduce the risk of further violence, they agreed to finalise in the shortest possible time an OSCE investigative mechanism.”

READ MORE: Armenia and Azerbaijan call Nagorno-Karabakh ceasefire

After the meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said he sensed there was now a desire on both sides for a compromise and that Russia was ready to do what it could to broker a more satisfactory deal, according to RIA news agency.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, in Vienna for meetings on Syria and Libya, held one-on-one talks with each of the leaders.

Among the measures accepted as a result of the Vienna meetings were an increase in monitors along the ceasefire line and the possible placement of cameras by the US, Russia and France, co-chairs of the so-called Minsk Group, to observe and document violations.

The group, operating under the auspices of the OSCE, is seeking to mediate an end to the conflict.

Sargsyan and Aliev both say that they support a negotiated settlement to the dispute. They last met in December, but hostilities broke out in April. About 110 soldiers from both sides were killed, along with several civilians, before a Russian-brokered ceasefire stopped the worst of the fighting.

Yet fears loom of a possible escalation, with Turkey strongly backing Azerbaijan and Russia obliged to protect Armenia by a mutual security pact.

Earlier this month, Armenia’s government gave the go-ahead to legislation that calls for recognising the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The government has blocked similar proposals from the opposition in the past but this time agreed to send it to parliament in what is seen as a warning to Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan has condemned the initiative, saying it is aimed at scuttling peace talks.

Nagorno-Karabakh: Contested narratives

US officials say that they are concerned the recent violence may be the result of each side testing the other’s defences, something made more troubling by the introduction of heavy weapons in recent years.

In previous skirmishes, casualties were mainly caused by sniper fire, but in the past year, both sides have introduced mortars, rocket launchers and artillery to the region, the officials said.

Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region in Azerbaijan with about 150,000 residents in an area of 12,000 square kms, has been under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since 1994.

The conflict is fuelled by long-simmering tensions between Armenians and Azeris and has been an economic blow to Armenia. Turkey has closed its border with Armenia as a result of the conflict, leaving the country with open borders only with Georgia and Iran.

{The 1966-76 Cultural Revolution is a history too long and too tragic to fully conceal.}

Being honest was my mom’s biggest regret. It was her truth-telling that cost her the only chance to attend university.

It was in the midst of the “Great Cultural Revolution” when school and university were practically halted, but not completely. My mom had just finished two years of senior high school. Chinese, math, physics, political science and English were taught.

But for most of the time, students were told to toil in the fields alongside farmers, or to weld away in the factories next to “great proletarians”.

When Fudan, one of the best universities in China, came to recruit freshmen from her commune, my mother was recommended and overly thrilled. She was so caught up in the excitement that she didn’t realise she wasn’t exactly qualified, since she only had just graduated from high school. Fudan wanted candidates to have two years of work experience before enrollment.

In such a chaotic era, she could have easily lied – but she didn’t and as a result, lost the chance at higher education forever.

My parents were both from the countryside. Their peasantry blood vaulted them to the top of the caste system back then. High-ranking officials and intellectuals were targets of the persecution at that time.

Chairman Mao Zedong wanted the masses at the bottom of society to challenge their teachers, superiors and, most importantly, those who were well-educated.

My parents and their parents didn’t go through the inhumane torture seen in the books and movies. All they did was chant slogans on public class struggles and recite excerpts from Mao’s Little Red Book.

However, they were no less victims compared to those who lost property and freedom – they lost the chance to receive education. When the late Chairman Deng Xiaoping decided to reverse the revolution, it was 1978. I was born that year. Colleges and universities started to enroll new students again, but it was too late for my mom.

My father, meanwhile, in order to change his fate of forever ploughing the rice paddies, chose to join the army and was stationed in one of the coldest provinces in China. He is a very intelligent man, but again he had no chance to receive a higher education.

Joining the army is the only way to change life. However, this meant that my parents were separated for 14 years. They saw each other twice per year. I still don’t know how they did it, in a time without smart phones or computers. They didn’t even have a regular phone.

That’s why most of my friends and I grew up in the shadow of “tiger moms” – they cherish the idea of being able to go to school and receive formal education for their only children. (China’s one-child policy started in 1978).

To achieve and hold onto their long cherished dream, they made sure their kids stay at the top of the class.

The Great Cultural Revolution is only part of the Communist Party’s rule. After 10 years, suddenly Deng Xiaoping moved everything back on track. He did by opening up society and reforming, but the mindset influenced by decades of communist reign remains, especially in my parents’ generation.

My parents are great optimists by heart but they still worry about a lot of things. When I was in college, my mom feared that one day the Party would send all the young students to the countryside, like they did in the 1950s.

She sometimes worries about my safety because of my job even though I’ve reassured her constantly that there is nothing to fear. When I was writing this blog, she told me: “Are you writing something? If so, do not mention my name.”

As a matter of fact, “do not mention my name” is something that I’ve heard a lot during my work. People in China are afraid of talking publicly, even about insensitive and non-political topics.

They always fear someone is going to retaliate for what they say, or they are at risk of being summoned by government officers. They cannot be blamed for living in a country that had so many people persecuted for speaking their minds.

When a country has an untold number of people victimised for expressing their thoughts – that becomes a scar on all who live in China. I hardly blame their reluctance.

Fifty years have passed since the Communist Party’s central committee passed the “May 16th Notice”, which was drafted by Chairman Mao. The notice is considered to be the official starting point of the Cultural Revolution.

Unlike the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on student pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989, 10 years of the “Great Cultural Revolution” is a history too long and too tragic to fully conceal.

Plenty of books, studies and films exist on the subject.

Still, there’s no official statistics on exactly how many people died or were persecuted, and there are no national memorials or museums to commemorate the deceased.

May the people of this land remember – and be remembered.

{Preliminary results after first round of voting show left-leaning economist well placed to avoid runoff polls in June.}

Dominican Republic’s incumbent President Danilo Medina looks poised to win the first round of voting easily in the country’s presidential election, early results suggest.

According to preliminary results from 15 percent of polling stations, Medina’s coalition won 61 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election, a margin that if sustained would be enough to avoid a runoff election in June.

The preliminary results gave his nearest rival, businessman Luis Abinader, 35 percent.

The remaining six candidates combined had less than four percent of votes, including the first two women running for the presidency in a Dominican election.

Sunday’s election was marred by a shootout at one voting centre, long lines and questions being raised over the vote-counting system after 3,000 poll workers went on strike.

Authorities allowed voting to continue for an extra hour until 23:00 GMT after delays at some centres.

A left-leaning economist, Medina has had high popularity ratings during the latter part of his four-year term in the country of 10.4 million.

{{Fastest growing economy}}

Electoral rules were changed to allow him to run for a second consecutive term.

Medina’s Dominican Liberation Party has been in power for 12 years.

In the last two years, he has overseen the fastest growing economy in the Americas.

But, despite the strong economy, many Dominicans struggle to meet basic needs, and poverty rates rose to 41 percent in the first year of Medina’s term, according to the World Bank.

New schools and health spending in recent years have won Medina support, and poverty has started to decline.

Abinader built his election campaign on a promise to double down on social spending.

He also focused on allegations of corruption related to a power plant awarded to Grupo Odebrecht, a Brazilian engineering conglomerate.

Medina’s campaign chief, Joao Santana, returned to Brazil in February to face charges Odebrecht had paid him funds siphoned from Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras in offshore accounts to finance the 2014 election campaign of Dilma Rousseff, the suspended Brazilian president.

Medina has yet to refer to the Petrobras scandal, but he did admit the Brazilian political strategist was his top adviser. Santana has called the allegations against him “baseless”.

Tense relations with Haiti was another important topic in Sunday’s general election in Dominican Republic.

Impoverished neighbour

With the fastest growing economy in Latin America in 2014 and 2015, Dominican Republic is considerably wealthier than its poor neighbour Haiti.

Two countries have similar population sizes but Haitians lag behind on basic facilities including health and education.

Last October’s disputed presidential election has left the country without a proper government and many Haitians left their homeland due to a lack of opportunities and political instability.

During his presidency, Medina has overseen the repatriation of tens of thousands of people with roots in Haiti.

Hundreds of thousands of people of Haitian descent have either been deported or lost their Dominican nationality for not having proper documentation.

The policy is popular at home but condemned by human rights groups.

The opposition in the Dominican Republic, on the other hand, claims that the incumbent president’s immigration policy is “not strict enough”.

{US secretary hopes to strengthen “cessation of hostilities” in Syria ahead of international talks in Vienna over crisis.}

US Secretary of State John Kerry has met Saudi Arabia’s King Salman in Jeddah to discuss the fragile truce in Syria, before he took off for broader talks with Russia, Iran and other countries in Vienna.

Kerry said after the talks on Sunday that he hoped to strengthen a “cessation of hostilities” agreement between Syrian government forces and rebels, which has been undermined by fighting in some areas.

On Tuesday, the US and Russia will co-chair a meeting of the International Syria Support Group, which includes Arab League and EU countries as well as Turkey, Iran and China.

“On Syria, the secretary provided an update of the situation on the ground following last week’s reaffirmation of the cessation of hostilities,” a US spokesman said on the meeting, according to the AFP news agency.

“The secretary also gave an update on Libya,” he said.

{{Syria tops agenda}}

In talks with his Saudi counterpart Adel al-Jubeir, Kerry discussed “regional issues… mainly developments in Syria,” the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

The monarch discussed “aspects of cooperation between the two countries and developments in the region and efforts in that regards,” SPA reported.

The US, Saudi Arabia and some other Western and Gulf Arab states plus Turkey back rebels fighting to remove President Bashar al-Assad, who has military support from Russia and Iran.

However, diplomats in the Gulf say Saudi Arabia sees US support for the rebels as inadequate, and fears that Washington may abandon their shared stance that Assad must immediately leave power as part of any negotiated political deal.

Kerry and Jubeir have previously characterised disagreements over Syria as being limited to “tactical differences” not objectives.

After his talks in Vienna on the Syrian crisis, Kerry will fly on to Brussels on Wednesday for a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting and talks on the full range of challenges facing the Western allies.

{Al Jazeera speaks to professor Ali Riaz on recent killings in Bangladesh and the groups that might be behind them.}

Bangladesh has witnessed the killings of secular bloggers and activists. Last year four secular bloggers and a publisher were hacked to death.

This year a gay rights activist and minority groups such as Hindus, Ahmadi and Shia Muslims have been fatally attacked.

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has claimed responsibility for some of the attacks, but the government denies the armed groups role.

But who are these groups? Are they home-grown or linked to ISIL or al-Qaeda?

Al Jazeera spoke to Ali Riaz, a Bangladeshi professor at Illinois State University, US, to get a sense of the situation. He has extensively written on politics and religious groups in Bangladesh.

{{Which groups are behind the killings of bloggers and activists in Bangladesh?}}

The first killing of bloggers was reported in 2013 in the wake of Shahbagh movement. For most of those killings, the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) claimed responsibility. ABT claims to be connected to al-Qaeda and is known as al-Qaeda in Indian Subcontinent. And those groups were present even before 2013.

On the other hand, all the killing of foreigners, attack on the Shia mosque, attack on bloggers and threatening of some priests have been claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Later ISIL media Dabiq ran a piece that they have been working together.

Here is my take: Militant groups have been active in Bangladesh for a long time, nothing new. In mid 1990s, we had seen the presence of militant groups. We saw spectacular attack in 2005 carried out by Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB). The group was banned after the attack. A counterterrorism strategy was adopted and to a great extent it succeeded.

The counterterrorism strategy under the 2007-08 caretaker government largely succeeded in keeping groups such JMB in check and other minor groups.

But since 2013, what we are witnessing is that counterterrorism has been used as political point-scoring. You should not be involving immediate political gain to counterterrorism. Counterterrorism and national security should always be above and beyond domestic and petty politics.

What do your take on the government claim that the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Jamaat-e-Islami party are behind the recent killings of bloggers?

The government has been trying to put the blame on BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami. Yes Jamaat was behind political violence, there is no doubt about it, in the wake of war crime tribunal verdicts in February 2013. But at this point of time I have not seen anything that would point that Jamaat-e-Islami organization would be part of these attacks.

{{Is there a presence of ISIL in Bangladesh?}}

Government claims that they have arrested ISIL recruiters, all these to show that they were fighting terrorism and they were winning.

Later they realised that by doing so, they were actually admitting the presence of ISIL, which means they are failing. So then they started taking back step.

At this point, as far as I know ISIL as an organisation might not be present but there are people in Bangladesh who are aspiring to be part of it. We have seen that because of vibrant online presence of these radical elements in Bangladesh, they want to be part of ISIL.

{{What are chances of local groups joining hands with ISIL?}}

After the Dabiq (ISIL magazine) essay on Bangladesh, it is not unlikely that remnants of JMB coming together, and possibly they are trying to get in touch with ISIL or ISIL is trying to get in touch with them.

You cannot say it has happened, but you cannot say it won’t happen. It’s a matter of time and opportunity that such groups get in contact with ISIL. If that happens there would be a dramatic shift. It is likely that it would happen at some point.

{{What’s fueling the rise of armed groups?}}

The government tried to club Jamaat, JMB and al-Qaeda together. That was detrimental to counterterrorism efforts. That’s where the space was created [for fringe armed groups], and we saw proliferation and strengthening of small militant groups.

You have to put all these things into the context of domestic politics. If you keep on pushing the legitimate opposition into the corner, this makes fringe militant groups and their message, though not acceptable, resonate with the situation.

They can go and tell people, see there is no way you can be part of the mainstream politics. So shrinking democratic space creates an environment where radical elements find sympathetic ears.

{{Is extremism growing in Bangladesh? If yes, why?}}

My reading is different from the conventional interpretations. Let me try to explain. Within Bangladesh, there is a growing extremism, please note I am not saying growing Islamic extremism. Extremism is at both the ends.

In the last few years, Bangladesh’s mainstream parties have resorted to political violence. The rhetoric has become violent while in the past it used to be moderate. If you continuously keep talking in violent rhetoric, it is bound to have an impact on the society. I think that is making Bangladeshi society more violent.

If you keep on talking in very extreme language, both sides, whether it’s the opposition, government or secular or Islamists it does not matter. Society is going to become radicalized. So to say that it has become radicalized because it is a Muslim nation, I tend to disagree with that.

Extremism has crept in the political discourse, in political rhetoric and made it possible for having violence as a normal activity. We have witnessed violence during the 2013-14 election and after the elections perpetrated by the opposition but also responded by the government in a very heavy-handed manner. I think radicalization is taking place because extremism has been normalized in Bangladeshi society. It is not sudden.

It is coming from all the sides. So why blame only one party for the violence.

{{What’s the role of current government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina?
}}

All these things are happening in the context of flawed elections, and an increasingly shrinking of democratic space and of course, limit imposed on freedom of speech.

Also, we have seen rampant use of information and communication technology under which people have been arrested in the name of hurting religious sentiments or posting things online which is critical of the government. So if you have to take all these things together to see what are the impacts there cannot be one single element that can be separated from the overall picture.

{{What needs to be done to check the trend?}}

There are armed groups, which are ideologically committed to fanaticism and their interpretation of religion. Sectarianism, which was pretty much absent, is expanding into a pattern.

My reading is that at this point unless addressed properly, given the global environment is conducive for these kinds of extremism or militancy, there is a huge risk that it may proliferate, it may spread. It is not going to happen just because people are saying it has not gone to the stage where it is unmanageable. But it needs to be addressed.

There should be comprehensive strategy, simply apprehending them, simply using coercive apparatus, police and law enforcement agencies are not going to work because it has not worked elsewhere.

You have to make sure that there is very inclusive political system, make sure there is no space for these kinds of radicalization, tone down rhetoric of violence in mainstream politics so that there is no space for these kinds of people.

{{Is there any connection between the growing violence and the International War Tribunal verdicts?}}

I would not put direct connection with international tribunal and the growing militancy. The reason is that there is enormous support for the tribunal. Bangladeshis want these people to be tried despite the fact that there are some concerns at the international and domestic level regarding procedural aspects of the trial, but nobody has ever questioned the legitimacy of these trials. Even if it is symbolic, there has to be a trial so that Bangladesh can put a closure to this.

But I think despite this trial, the main issue is that militancy should be viewed in the overall environment created in which they flourish.

{Attack on plant outside Baghdad kills at least 11 and forces two power stations to suspend electricity production.}

An ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) attack on a state-run gas plant in Baghdad’s northern outskirts on Sunday killed at least 11 people, including policemen, and forced two power stations to suspend electricity production.

A suicide car bomb went off at the entrance of the facility in Taji at around 0600 local time (0300 GMT), allowing another vehicle carrying at least six attackers with explosive vests to enter and clash with security forces, police sources said. Twenty-one people were also wounded.

The armed group said in an online statement that four fighters with machine guns had killed the guards at the plant which it said the Iraqi army was using as a headquarters.

When reinforcements arrived, they set off a parked car bomb before clashing with the security forces and detonating their suicide vests.

A spokesman for Baghdad Operations Command said three of the facility’s gas storages were set alight before security forces were able to bring the situation under control.

Iraq’s oil ministry said the attack had not disrupted the plant’s production of gas for cooking and electricity production.

But the electricity ministry said two nearby power stations had halted operations due to a cut in gas supplies from the Taji plant.

It was not clear how long it would take to restore flow to the power stations, which provided 153 megawatts to the already overstretched national grid before the attack.

Video broadcast by Al Hadath TV showed a fireball surging from the plant.

An employee who lives nearby said after hearing a powerful blast he saw flames and black smoke coming from inside the facility. Dozens of police and army vehicles rushed to the site where shooting lasted for about an hour, he said.

ISIL, which controls swathes of the country’s north and west, has carried out a string of bombings this week that killed around 100 people.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Saturday ISIL was taking advantage of a political crisis in the country, sparked by his attempt to overhaul its quota-based governing system, to conduct bombings in areas under nominal government control.