For several years, Bangladesh appeared to have solved its jihadist problem. The security forces had dismantled networks, killed or arrested senior commanders and disrupted the organisational structure responsible for the 2016 Holey Artisan Bakery massacre. Neo-Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh, the Islamic State-inspired faction that had briefly turned Dhaka into one of the most visible fronts of international jihadism, seemed to have been reduced to scattered fugitives and online sympathisers.

The bombs now reappearing around Dhaka suggest that the victory may have been less definitive than advertised.

On August 16, police arrested 26-year-old Juel Bhuiyan in Demra with two handmade explosive devices. He was allegedly associated with Nazmul Hasan Mamun, better known as Bomaru Mamun, a fugitive suspected of leading a small Neo-JMB cell. Four days earlier, a powerful pressure-cooker bomb had been found beside a mosque in Savar. Another had been recovered outside a grocery shop in Ashulia at the end of July. On August 11, Mohammad Arif, another suspected Neo-JMB operative, was arrested in Hemayetpur with pipe bombs, weapons and bomb-making materials.

Taken separately, these incidents could be dismissed as the work of a few surviving militants with more chemicals than organisational capacity. Taken together—and placed alongside attacks on police posts, intelligence personnel, a temple and members of minority communities—they indicate something more serious: Neo-JMB is attempting to rebuild itself through small, decentralised cells that require neither a territorial base nor a large formal hierarchy.

This is not necessarily the return of the organisation that emerged in 2014, when dissidents from the original Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh rejected Saidur Rahman’s leadership and moved towards the considerably more radical ideology of Islamic State. Nor does it yet resemble the network that organised the Holey Artisan attack, in which twenty hostages, including seventeen foreigners, were killed. Most of that generation’s leadership was eliminated after 2016. Forty-seven Neo-JMB militants have since been killed by the security forces, including its chief Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, military commander Murad, financier Nazmul Haque, deputy chief Nurul Islam Marzan and military chief Aminur Islam.

But decapitation is not the same thing as eradication. Killing commanders can destroy an organisation’s structure without removing the political environment, ideological networks and recruitment channels from which it emerged. Bangladesh now appears to be confronting the consequences of that distinction.

In 2024 and 2025, no arrests linked to Neo-JMB were officially recorded. In 2026, at least five suspected operatives had already been detained by August 23. The number remains small, but the change is significant. Terrorist organisations rarely announce their recovery by immediately carrying out spectacular attacks. They begin by reconnecting fugitives, recruiting inexperienced members, testing explosives and probing the reactions of the security apparatus.

The devices recovered in recent months point precisely in that direction. Investigators searching Arif’s rented house in South Shyampur found liquid chemicals, potassium nitrate, detonators, electrical wires, remote controllers and the remains of pipe bombs. More worrying was the reported use of tri-acetone triperoxide, or TATP, an extremely unstable explosive frequently employed by jihadist networks because its ingredients are relatively easy to acquire. According to investigators, the cell may also have been developing remotely controlled devices, representing a progression from crude homemade bombs towards more technically sophisticated capabilities.

The organisation has adapted its communications as well. Its members allegedly used encrypted platforms, pseudonyms and private online groups, while Arif reportedly referred to the Protected Text website and the Element application. This is the contemporary jihadist model: small autonomous units, digital indoctrination, compartmentalised communications and improvised financing. The old command pyramid has been replaced by networks that are less efficient but considerably harder to map.

Neo-JMB’s recruitment pool is equally revealing. Recent suspects include young men, a sixteen-year-old boy and former members of the armed forces. Mohammad Raheed Hossain Mahed, arrested in May, was a former soldier reportedly inspired by Neo-JMB ideology. The detained minor had been in contact with two dismissed military personnel and had allegedly attended a clandestine meeting at Zia Udyan. Such links do not prove institutional penetration, but they demonstrate the group’s ability to attract individuals with at least some exposure to military discipline, weapons or security procedures.

At the same time, it continues to recruit adolescents through an ideological ecosystem that exists largely beyond formal membership. This is where the distinction between terrorist groups and supposedly respectable Islamist organisations becomes politically inconvenient. As a senior Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime official observed in 2024, the ideological distance separating groups such as Neo-JMB and Ansar Al Islam from so-called Islamist parties is often remarkably thin. They do not necessarily share the same methods, but their narratives overlap: hostility towards secularism, religious minorities and pluralist institutions, accompanied by the representation of political violence as religious duty.

The terrorist cell does not develop in isolation from that wider environment. It occupies its violent outer edge.

Neo-JMB has reportedly sought to bring its operatives under a single platform, create separate cells linked through a chain of command and narrow the distance between itself and other Islamist formations. Its earlier decision to establish a twenty-member military committee under the name “Islamic State of Bengal Province” demonstrated the ambition to embed a local organisation inside the mythology of global jihad. Even if direct operational ties with Islamic State remain limited, the label provides legitimacy, propaganda and an identity capable of surviving the death of individual commanders.

Bangladesh’s authorities therefore face a danger that extends well beyond the five-member cell allegedly led by Bomaru Mamun. At least 311 members of banned militant organisations remained at large as of April 2026, including sixteen Neo-JMB operatives, 185 members of the original JMB, eighty-three from Ansar Al Islam and sixteen from Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami Bangladesh. These are not simply separate names on a police list. They represent overlapping generations of jihadism, from the Afghanistan-linked veterans of HuJI-B to the Islamic State-inspired cadres of Neo-JMB and the digitally oriented militants of Ansar Al Islam.

Bangladesh has encountered each incarnation before. JMB announced itself in 2005 by detonating hundreds of bombs in sixty-three of the country’s sixty-four districts. HuJI-B imported the political and military culture of the Afghan jihad. Neo-JMB then repackaged domestic extremism in the language and aesthetics of Islamic State. The names changed more rapidly than the ideological infrastructure beneath them.

The immediate risk is not that Neo-JMB is about to seize territory or reproduce the Holey Artisan massacre tomorrow. It is that fragmented networks are acquiring the people, materials and technical knowledge required to move from experimentation to coordinated violence. Pressure-cooker bombs abandoned in public places may look amateurish, but they are also rehearsals: opportunities to test construction methods, security responses and the willingness of inexperienced recruits to act.

The broader risk is geopolitical. Instability in Bangladesh would not remain a domestic matter. The country sits beside India’s sensitive northeastern states, along trafficking routes linking South and Southeast Asia, and close to a region already crowded with militant networks, displaced populations and competing intelligence services. A revived jihadist ecosystem would create opportunities for cooperation across organisational borders and provide Islamic State with another supposed “province” to advertise at a time when its central organisation no longer needs territorial control to project influence.

The security forces were successful in destroying Neo-JMB’s previous leadership. Their mistake would be to assume that the organisation died with its commanders. Bangladesh’s jihadist threat has survived through mutation: from one acronym to another, from physical training camps to encrypted rooms, from recognisable hierarchies to five men carrying backpacks.

The embers were never extinguished. Someone has merely started blowing on them again.