For years, Bangladesh was treated by Western policymakers as a peripheral concern in the global fight against Islamist extremism—too distant, too inward-looking, too preoccupied with domestic politics to matter strategically. That illusion is collapsing under the “interim” regime of Nobel laureate Mohamed Yunus. The recent lynching of Dipu Ranjan Das, a Hindu man brutally killed by a mob amid religious incitement, with inaction from law enforcement is not an aberration. It is a symptom of a deeper and more dangerous transformation unfolding inside one of the world’s most populous Muslim-majority states.

Bangladesh is undergoing a visible Islamist drift marked by mob violence, intimidation of minorities, silencing of secular voices, and the normalization of religious vigilantism. These developments are often framed as internal law-and-order failures by Yunus who took over once an Muslim brotherhood backed student coup deposed democratically elected Shiekh Hasina. In reality, they represent the growth of an ideological ecosystem that does not stop at Bangladesh’s borders—and one that increasingly intersects with global jihadist narratives hostile to the West and obsessively fixated on Israel.

The murder of Dipu Ranjan Das matters not only because it exposes the vulnerability of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority, but........

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