[But this assault, along with recent attacks in other countries, including the shooting in Orlando, Fla., are viewed by Western intelligence officials as bloody examples that as the Islamic State loses territory in Iraq and Syria, it has increasingly turned to directing and inspiring terrorist missions elsewhere around the world.]
By Julfikar Ali Manik, Geeta
Anand and Eric Schmitt
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Relatives mourn victims
killed in the siege. At least 30 people were wounded.
Credit European Press photo
Agency
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DHAKA,
Bangladesh — Bangladeshi
troops stormed an upscale restaurant in Dhaka’s diplomatic quarter on Saturday,
ending an 11-hour standoff with gunmen who had hacked patrons to death and sent
photos of the carnage to the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for
the attack.
The authorities said 20 hostages, most of
them foreigners, had been killed in the siege, the deadliest and boldest in an
accelerating series of attacks by Islamist militants that have shaken the
country’s secular underpinnings.
But this assault, along with recent attacks
in other countries, including the shooting in Orlando, Fla., are viewed by
Western intelligence officials as bloody examples that as the Islamic State
loses territory in Iraq and Syria, it has increasingly turned to directing and
inspiring terrorist missions elsewhere around the world.
Most of the victims in Dhaka were
“ferociously” attacked with sharp weapons, a military spokesman said. A kitchen
worker who escaped said the attackers had been armed with pistols, swords and
bombs.
A team of army commandos rescued 13 hostages
and killed six attackers in the raid on Saturday morning, the military said. A
seventh attacker was arrested.
The government said Saturday that the dead
hostages were nine Italians, seven Japanese, an Indian, two Bangladeshis and an
American.
At least 30 people were wounded, mostly from
shrapnel. Two police officers were killed in the initial standoff, the
authorities said.
“Islamic State commandos attack a restaurant
frequented by foreigners in the city of Dhaka in Bangladesh,” Amaq, an
information outlet linked to the Islamic State, said Friday. Early Saturday,
the group posted photographs of what it said were the bodies of foreigners who
had been killed.
The Bangladeshi soldiers, backed by armored
vehicles, swept into the restaurant, the Holey Artisan Bakery, at 7:40 a.m.
The entire operation took 12 or 13 minutes,
Brig. Gen. Nayeem Ashfaque Chowdhury, the head of military operations in
Bangladesh, said at a news conference. However, gunfire and explosions were
heard outside the restaurant for about 40 minutes.
Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, was locked
down on Saturday, with checkpoints every few blocks stopping cars and
pedestrians.
The attacks have raised fears that the
once-moderate country is in the grip of a wave of violence coordinated by
international terrorist groups, although the government has insisted that the
attacks are committed by local groups and not coordinated by outside forces.
The government recently concluded a crackdown
in which more than 10,000 people were arrested, 194 of them reportedly
connected with local militant networks.
The scale and level of coordination of
Friday’s attack should force the government to reconsider its position that the
militancy is locally run, critics said.
“The continuous denial of the presence of
local militant group connections with international terror groups has not been
helpful,” said Ali Riaz, a professor of political science at Illinois State
University and an expert on South Asian politics. “What we’re witnessing can’t
be small groups coming together. It is clearly a very coordinated attack. If
this doesn’t convince them to come out of denial, then I don’t know what will.”
Bangladeshi detectives debriefed the
surviving hostages. One of them, Sat Prakash, an Indian physician who worked in
a nearby clinic, escaped shortly before the army raid. He complained in a
telephone interview that he was exhausted from a terrifying, sleepless night
and should not have been forced to endure round after round of questioning
right after his release.
“I can’t believe we’re being held for so long
after the night we’ve had,” he said. He declined to discuss what had happened
during the attack.
The Western intelligence officials
acknowledge that they now face a challenging and vicious transformation in the
Islamic State: The terrorist group that burst onto the scene by professing to
create a religious state is increasingly becoming a larger, more sophisticated
version of its stateless rival, Al Qaeda.
The military solutions to combating the
Islamic State, mostly air and ground strikes in Iraq and Syria, remain
important, officials say. But those traditional military efforts now are just
one approach, since deterring, preventing and dealing with threats against
far-flung and chiefly civilian targets is a growing priority for law
enforcement and intelligence services.
One of the first victims to be publicly
identified in the Dhaka attack was Tarishi Jain, 19, of India. Sushma Swaraj,
India’s minister of external affairs, said Ms. Jain was a student at the
University of California, Berkeley, and a graduate of the American
International School in Dhaka.
“I have spoken to her father Shri Sanjeev
Jain and conveyed our deepest condolences,” Ms. Swaraj wrote on Twitter. “The country
is with them in this hour of grief.”
Emory University identified the slain
American as Abinta Kabir, a sophomore who lived in Miami. The university also
said an Emory junior, Faraaz Hossain, had also been killed. He was from Dhaka.
Armed men entered the restaurant, where about
20 foreigners were dining, about 8:45 p.m. on Friday, Sumon Reza, the kitchen
worker, told reporters. The attackers shouted “God is great” before opening
fire and detonating several explosives, he said.
A cook, Sumir Barai, said he had taken refuge
with several other employees in a tiny bathroom.
Mr. Barai, 28, said two men, one carrying a
gun and the other a knife, had forced them to open the door. The men, speaking
in Bengali, lectured the employees on the importance of praying and reading the
Quran. The men then herded the employees back into the bathroom, and let them
out again shortly before soldiers raided the restaurant.
Mr. Barai said one of the militants had
pointed to bodies on the floor, saying, “The same thing is going to happen to
us now,” suggesting that the militants knew they were going to die.”
The restaurant’s chef, Diego Rossini, an
Argentine, told C5N, a television network in Argentina, that four to six young
men, who appeared to be in their early 20s, had entered with a big bag of
weaponry, including grenades and long rifles.
Mr. Rossini was able to escape to the roof
and hide there. “They came looking for me, and I had to throw myself to the
next building,” he said.
At least 40 people have been killed in attacks
by Islamist militants in this Muslim-majority country since 2013. Most were
carried out with machetes and first targeted atheist bloggers, then religious
minorities, gay activists, foreigners and others.
The Islamic State and a local branch of Al
Qaeda have claimed responsibility for many of the attacks. The Islamic State is
known to have claimed responsibility for 18 of them, most perpetrated against
religious minorities, including Hindus, Buddhists and Christians.
The Holey Artisan Bakery, in Dhaka’s Gulshan
neighborhood, is popular with expatriates, diplomats and middle-class families.
Mr. Reza, the kitchen worker, said he and
another employee had escaped by jumping from the second floor.
“They blasted several crude bombs, causing
wide-scale panic among everyone,” Mr. Reza told a Bangladeshi newspaper, The
Daily Star. “I managed to flee during this confusion.”
During the standoff, the police erected a
cordon around the restaurant, where relatives of those inside gathered to await
information. Fazley Rahim Khan, a businessman, waited on the edge of the police
line. He said he believed that his son Tahmid Hasib Khan, 22, was being held
hostage.
Mr. Khan said Tahmid, a student in Canada,
had just returned home on Friday for Ramadan. The family celebrated the iftar,
the evening meal breaking the Ramadan fast, and then the son headed to the
restaurant.
“I’m
just praying to get back my son,” he said. The son survived, along with two of
his friends, the police said.
At least two Sri Lankans were among the
hostages, Harikesha Wijesekera, a former president of the Sri Lanka-Bangladesh
Chamber of Commerce, and his wife, Shyama, according to the group’s current
president, T. D. Packir.
The Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry said later
that two Sri Lankan citizens had been rescued and were unharmed.
At least one Japanese citizen was among those
rescued, Japan’s deputy chief cabinet secretary, Koichi Hagiuda, said at a news
conference.
The Japan International Cooperation Agency
said the Japanese were employees of three Tokyo-based companies that were
working on a transportation project sponsored by the agency.
NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting network,
identified the Japanese survivor as Tamaoki Watanabe. It quoted a hospital spokesman
in Dhaka as saying that Mr. Watanabe had been shot in the face and was in
surgery.
In recent interviews, John O. Brennan, the
director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has been unusually blunt about the
slow nature of progress in the fight against the Islamic State outside Syria
and Iraq. He has voiced fears that allied policy is not keeping up with a
formidable and resilient enemy that is accelerating its shift to a new phase of
terrorism.