Golam Azam, the notorious Jamaat-e-Islami amir who fled to Pakistan and took citizenship in that country following the 1971 liberation war that led to the establishment of Bangladesh, is back in currency in his country of origin. This time in the form of his son, Brigadier (retd) Abdullahil Aman Azmi.
On December 23, Brig Azmi met Pakistan’s Deputy High Commissioner Mohammad Wasif at his Banani Officers’ Housing Scheme apartment at 2 pm, setting off speculations that he could be backed by Islamabad to make a bid for the Home Ministry Adviser’s post which was to be vacated by Lieutenant General (retd) Jahangir Alam Chowdhury.
Brig Azmi was said to be in a secret detention centre since his arrest in 2009, when he was sacked from the Army for reasons that are still not clear. He was taken into custody in August 2016 and supposedly lodged in a secret detention centre. Since his appearance in Dhaka after August 6, 2024, Brig Azmi’s pay and other emoluments were restored by the defence authorities, indicating that Army chief General Waker-uz-Zaman found his incarceration to be wrongful.
The controversial Army officer, who was commissioned in 1981 and was part of the Fifth Bangladesh Military Academy long course, was assigned to the 14th East Bengal Regiment as his parent unit.
Since his release from detention, he has been outspoken against not only Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League but also the Indian authorities, whom he holds responsible for propping up the previous regime.
Bangladesh security service reports accessed by Northeast News show that he held regular meetings with not just other retired but serving Bangladesh Army officers and Pakistani diplomats based in Dhaka.
These meetings have not been lost on the Indian security establishment who remain “interested” in Brig Azmi’s “associations,” some of which indicate that he has had multiple interactions with Islamist forces that have now found renewed space in Bangladesh’s politics.
Indeed, sources in Bangladesh’s security and military establishments say that Brig Azmi runs a “parallel leadership” in the Army, with Gen Zaman not being hesitant in “deferential” towards him. He is also said to be the “nucleus” of a rightwing ideology that has found firm ground within the Army, which, the sources said, has an influential grouping inclined towards the Jamaat-e-Islami’s brand of politics.
What is more alarming, classified documents reveal, is that a number of radicalised retired Bangladeshi military officers living in Banani DOHS have been holding clandestine meetings with Pakistani intelligence operatives to establish an Islamist militia under the cover of ‘National Armed Reserve’.
At least four apartments in two specific roads in the Banani DOHS are routinely used by Brig Azmi, a retired major general and a former major to meet their Pakistani handlers, Bangladeshi security service reports accessed by Northeast News reveal.
But there are other senior serving Bangladesh Army officers that Brig Azmi continues to be in touch with, including a senior officer in the Armed Forces Division, Military Secretary’s branch, the Navy and the DGFI and NSI.
The plan to establish a National Armed Reserve, numbering an estimated 8,800 radicalised Muslim youth, follows protracted meetings between Pakistani officials and the Jamaat-e-Islami and its students wing, the Islami Chhatra Shibir.
While plans are supposedly underway to provide these youth weapons training, field tactics and semi-military drills, the wider strategy involves, documents reveal, effective integration into terror networks, induction into the Harkat-ul-Jehadi Islami (HUJI) and the Ansarullah Bangla Team, whose leader, Jashimuddin Rahamani, discharged from prison in August 2024, continues to play a clandestine role in the radical Islamist process.
The collaboration between the Pakistani and Bangladeshi security establishments, sources said, envisages military training and, more ominously, infiltration within Bangladesh’s elite security agencies such as the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence and the National Security Intelligence.
