U.S. embassy officials in Bangladesh this week met with Islamist officials at the Sylhet regional office of Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, the violent, terror-tied Islamist movement responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians during Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War.
The trip to Sylhet was just the latest in a string of meetings between representatives of the U.S. State Department and officials of Jamaat and other dangerous Islamist movements, as Bangladesh’s February elections, an ostensible conclusion to the 2024 mass uprising against the government of Sheikh Hasina, draw closer.
With Islamists and their allies leading the polls, a theocratic future for Bangladesh looks increasingly likely, and Jamaat-e-Islami appears poised to take power.
With branches across South Asia, Jamaat-e-Islami not only engaged in acts of genocide and mass-rape in 1971, but for decades has advanced theocratic politics and violence across South Asia and among Bangladeshi diaspora communities. Jamaat’s offshoots commit terror attacks and its officials incite hatred and violence against Muslim minorities, Hindus, Jews, and the Western world.
In 2014, Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre named Islami Chhatra Shibir, Jamaat’s student wing in Bangladesh, the third-most violent non-state armed group in the world. An Australian government report states: “In the lead-up to and following the 2014 elections, Jamaat-e-Islami activists launched a wave of attacks against the Hindu community, killing more than two dozen, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses, and displacing thousands.”
A year later, a Canadian government report notes, human rights organizations documented Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh’s role in the murder of civilians and police, including petrol bomb attacks.
Nonetheless, the U.S. has been talking with Jamaat for some time. On the eve of violent protests against Sheikh Hasina’s government in 2023, a U.S. diplomat met with a senior Jamaat leader at the American Club in Dhaka. At the same time, Bangladeshi commentators alleged Islamist contact with other U.S. embassy officials.
In 2025, the U.S. government’s outreach to Jamaat really took off. In March, two former U.S. ambassadors visited Jamaat’s headquarters to meet with the Islamist movement’s leaders. In June, officials invited a Jamaat “delegation” to the U.S. embassy to discuss “leadership selection, organisational structure, decision-making transparency, and the party’s stance on the rights of women and minority communities.”
In July, Traci Anne Jacobson, the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy, visited the headquarters of Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, where she met with Jamaat’s ameer (leader), Shafiqur Rahman.
Rahman refers to Jews as the “enemy of humanity.” He recently praised Hamas terror leader Yahya Sinwar as a “hero.”
The Trump administration handed Rahman a visa in November 2025 to visit the United States, where the Islamist leader met with American Jamaat-e-Islami activists and reportedly “held meetings in New York, Buffalo, Michigan, and Washington D.C., with both government and non-government representatives.”
In August, U.S. embassy officials also met with Islami Andolan Bangladesh at its Dhaka office. An Islamist party that looks increasingly competitive in the polls, Islami Andolan Bangladesh, has vowed to impose sharia law nationally and model Bangladesh on the Taliban’s Afghanistan. A Jamaat-led coalition regime involving Islami Andolan Bangladesh and other Islamists is looking increasingly likely.
Leaders of another key Jamaat ally, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), have also met with U.S. officials in London. In the U.S., both the BNP and Jamaat have, in recent years, jointly spent millions on lobbying firms.
Officials from a leading U.S. publicly funded think tank, the International Republican Institute (IRI) have been particularly active on the ground in Bangladesh. The IRI, which is closely associated with the ruling Republican Party, has held multiple meetings with Jamaat officials, including an August 2025 meeting at the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh headquarters.
Bangladesh’s Islamist-friendly caretaker government, led by Muhammad Yunus, has explicitly pursued outreach to Republican Party members in the United States through the International Republican Institute.
IRI staff also met with Jamaat allies, the BNP, as well as the pro-Taliban Islami Andolan Bangladesh.
Several of IRI’s meetings were attended by officials of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), with which the IRI has shared staff in Bangladesh and operates joint projects. Both are dependents of the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy.
The U.S. is not alone in seeking influence. Governments from around the world have sought an audience with Jamaat leaders. One Bangladeshi media outlet reports that, in September 2025, “envoys from 19 countries and three international organisations held formal meetings with Jamaat leaders. … Over the past year, that figure has swelled to at least 35 nations including heavyweights like the United States, United Kingdom, China, Russia, France, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and the European Union.”
Jamaat’s infamous violent student wing is also reportedly “now part of this global outreach” to Western governments.
Jamaat-e-Islami claims to be winning over Western diplomats: “We’re being asked: What will Jamaat do now? What is your manifesto? Are you committed to democratic processes? … After listening to our side, many say the negative narratives they’d heard were false and some even laugh, realising how distorted the picture had been.”
Following the collapse of the Awami League government in 2024, as a result of Jamaat-backed protests, the interim government under Muhammad Yunus brought violent Islamist movements into the political mainstream, and has persistently looked the other way as Islamist and anti-minority violence grows.
Authorities have jailed dozens of journalists, including the anti-Jamaat filmmaker Shahriar Kabir, who was seemingly arrested at the request of Islamists. The U.S.-backed interim government, employing the rhetoric of despots, declared Kabir’s crime to be “objectionable and misleading statements that are detrimental to communal harmony and subversive of the state,” and “tarnishing the image of Bangladesh and of the government in the outside world.”
Bangladesh’s Islamist movements operate with increasing impunity, as commentators warn of mob attacks on Hindu and Christian communities, growing calls for repressive blasphemy laws, and increasing levels of jihadist activity.
In August last year, a U.N. report notes, BNP and “some members, supporters and local leaders” of Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh were found to have committed a series of violent attacks against political opponents as well as “members of the Hindu community.”
The Trump administration appear to be repeating the mistakes of the past few decades, when policymakers and intelligence officials began to regard the Muslim Brotherhood as a potential stabilizing force in a new Egypt, and a partner for counter-terrorism efforts domestically.
As the academic Anne Pierce notes, following the ouster of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, “Brotherhood participation in presidential elections was so controversial in Egypt itself that, even after Mubarak’s ouster, Brotherhood leaders themselves promised not to run for election. Rather than attempting to publicly hold them to this pledge, or at least staying neutral on the subject, Obama and Clinton again publicly offered support for Muslim Brotherhood participation in Egyptian elections.”
Across the Middle East, Western governments worked to embrace Arab Spring Islamists and abandon counter-Islamist allies. Dangerous Islamist diaspora networks, meanwhile, established new infrastructure that operated freely across the West, as government prosecutions into Western proxies for terror groups such as Hamas were permanently shelved.
The government-backed IRI and NDI became intimately involved in this Islamist outreach. As early as 2007, a U.S. Institute for Peace report discussed “U.S.-funded engagement with legal, nonviolent Islamist parties [in the Middle East] through the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI).” The two publicly-funded groups, the report noted, “have the most extensive experience engaging with Islamists in the region” and have worked particularly closely in “Morocco, Jordan, and Yemen, because of their relative political openness and the strength and vibrancy of their Islamist political opposition.”
Delusion about Islamist engagement never faded. As recently as 2024, the NDI openly worked in Yemen to empower the terror-tied Muslim Brotherhood offshoot Al-Islah.
More recently, federal departments have handed millions to key institutions of foreign Islamist movements, including the Hamas-connected Malaysian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Now, it seems, Trump administration officials and quangos such as the NDI and IRI are making the same mistakes yet again in South Asia, convinced that Jamaat can be a moderating force over the future politics of a grim and theocratic Bangladesh.
One Bangladeshi news outlet explains Western diplomats’ visits to Jamaat headquarters: “Professor Ruhul Amin of Dhaka University … argues that Western powers now view Islamic parties not as threats to democracy, but as potential stabilisers—provided they operate within constitutional frameworks. ‘They want partners committed to human rights, inclusion and good governance. And they’re testing whether Jamaat fits that mould.’”
Will Western governments ever learn?
