Khandakar Tahmid Rejwan
Since the ouster of Sheikh Hasina in August 2024, the banned Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir Bangladesh (HTB) has taken advantage of weak interim governance to openly campaign for its legalization, as well as stage protests and recruit among students, professionals, and elements of the security forces. The group poses a growing long-term threat to Bangladesh’s stability.
HTB’s appeal lies in targeting high-achieving youth disillusioned with secular values, while cultivating links with military officers and bureaucrats to push its agenda of establishing a global caliphate. Although branding itself as nonviolent, HTB’s ideology has served as a pipeline to more violent jihadist groups.
The group’s resurgence has been marked by propaganda campaigns, covert seminars, and large mobilizations like the “March for Khilafot” earlier in 2025, which drew thousands to Dhaka’s main mosque. These activities underscore its capacity to operate in the “gray zone” between politics and extremism, challenging state control.
There are hundreds of trained members unaccounted for after prison breaks in 2024, and sympathizers are known to be in elite positions within Bangladesh’s interim government.
Since the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s regime in early August 2024, there has been an increase in activities by the banned group Hizb ut-Tahrir in Bangladesh (Bangla: হিযবুত তাহরীর বাংলাদেশ; the organization’s Bangladeshi chapter is referred to as HTB). Taking advantage of a dysfunctional administrative and law enforcement system, HTB began conducting political-religious activities openly, and demanded its name be removed from the list of designated terrorist groups (Prothom Alo Bangla, September 9, 2024). The Islamist group exploited the fragile state of the new Bangladeshi interim government to hold public seminars, appeal to remove its proscribed status, and engage in recruitment. These HTB activities primarily utilize online and in-person “gray zone tactics” (neither clearly legal nor illegal) that exploit the interim government’s weak and indecisive posture.
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