But Nibras Islam was no refugee or immigrant in a foreign land growing up with the stigma of being a "rag head’’, "desert rat’’ who fits the profilt awaiting a random selection for airport detention. Born in an elite family, his life was the dream of some 48 million Bangladeshis who live below the poverty line. With Muslim blood flowing through his vein and reflecting in his name, he never had the misfortune to be the centre of xenophobic violence and discrimination that is rampant in Bangladesh.

In the West, the ingredients into the making of an Islamist terrorist is muddled in the debate of political correctness. The typical Islamist terrorist is a traditionally dressed, bearded young or middle-aged bloke from the minority Muslim community with a refugee or immigrant status who failed to integrate with the Western culture. His path embodies the frustration and humiliation he endured because of anti-Muslim racism fuelled by terrorist attacks and US airstrikes in Syria or Yemen every now and then. So he has no other choice than to avenge his ‘oppressed’ Ummah and holy prophet by seeking the path of spiritual struggle – finding his center among other Mujahid brothers in a local mosque who aspires the exact goal of vengeance. This profile of a terrorist pretty much applies to Islamist terrorist from the educated, high-income class of Muslim immigrants and to the illiterate poor English speaking "desert rats" of the Middle East seeking refuge from bloody war and abject poverty.

Are you into de-platforming activists from universities and firing them from Amnesty branding them as ''Islamophobe' because they are honest about the link between uncontested platform offered to extremist Islamist leaders and radicalisation? Hoping it will prevent another young loner from joining Syria or going on a shooting spree at gay club? Well, welcome to a land where Islam is the state religion. At least 89% of the population are Muslim and your excuses of ''anti-Muslim'' bigotry, racism, or mental health no longer hold (In some Islam-dominant countries, the political landscape is now upside down, where punishment for proselytism except for converting non-Muslims range from monetary fine, to prison to death sentence). Xenophobia now embodies anti-Rohingya, anti-Bihari, anti-Hindu sentiment, and while the wheel of political Islamism is on a roll, professing mental health problem as the pioneering discovery causing suicide bombing and mass shooting will not get you as much face time on national television.

Bangladesh started off with a secular constitution in 1971 but failing to rid its political landscape off from the Islamists and pro-Islamist parties that still retained after the Liberation War, series of instability incorporating corruption, assassination of its founding father, military coups eventually installed Islam as the state religion in 1988. While decade-long political campaign by several Islamic parties including the now banned Jamaat-e-Islami continued to introduce blasphemy law, Bangladesh upholds variations of penal codes such as the Section 57 of ICT 2006 that limits free speech on any electronic media preventing any derogatory opinion on religion or a political leader, punishing any deviation with a minimum 7 years in prison.

Where Muslims are a 90% staggering majority in countries with Islam being the state religion, the affinity for Jihad no longer emerge from the failure to integrate in a racially diverse society or anti-Muslim racism, with the dynamics of Middle East-versus-West geopolitics operating on it, or even incurable mental health problems emerging from some combination of the above excuses that afflicts members of the Muslim community only, no matter which sect they belong to. In fact in Bangladesh it is perfectly normal, and often praiseworthy to embody any version of Islam, whether Wahhabi, Salafi, Shia or Sunni, in every aspect of life until you are bombing restaurants frequented by foreigners or slaughtering secular atheist bloggers. Then it’s trouble, because in the age of internet, the news quickly gets out to rest of the world and the Bangladeshi government (whether it’s the politically correct Left or the pro-Islamist Right) is held accountable to it.

The crux of the deadly ISIS terrorist attack led by Nibras Islam and two of his four aides named Rohan Imtiaz and Mir Sabih Mubashsher, and also in the greater context of many of the major ISIS attacks targeting civilians in public places (take the 2013 Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev), is that there is effectively no way you can profile the masterminds and the chief perpetrators of these attacks any differently from the people they killed. In context of the same attack, like the Japanese/ Italian/ Indian expatriates, and like the young Bangladeshi victims they killed – three of the five Islamic State terrorists were never known for wearing any garment in public that could brand them a devout traditional Muslim. Neither had they espoused any views that could pigeon-hole them into any stereotype other than typical moderate Muslim or a non-Muslim liberal who subscribe to a PC culture blaming the plight of today’s Muslim world on the US invasion of Iraq or the Israeli occupation of Gaza and branding any criticism against Islam as hate speech against Muslims. The three Bangladeshi ISIS jihadists in their 20s came from wealthy and politically elite backgrounds, went to expensive schools with Western curriculum, typical concert-goes, gamers, dated women, broke up, dated again, travelled to UK, made it to esteemed universities, including Malaysia’s Monash University. And had they settled in any Western country, they would perfectly integrate into the Western culture which Nibras did for a while.

Long story short: The ISIS terrorists who brutally killed at least 20 innocent people looked like any ordinary person with a modern outlook – an atheist, a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim or even an Ex-Muslim.

And just like the Japanese, Italian, Indian, Bangladesh and American expatriates they killed, these three of five ISIS attackers have also successfully posed as harmless and passed through every counter-extremism radars, airport security point or local security checkpoint (which they did to reach their target Holey Artisan Bakery). They must have also evaded intelligence intercepts picked up by spies spanning at least Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Malaysia. It is only India where intelligence forces vaguely picked up a signal of a potential attack but failed to locate the perpetrators’ identity, date and location nonetheless informing Bangladesh about the risk.

Once the identities of the ISIS attackers were revealed that killed 22 people including Bangladeshis and expats from India, Italy, Japan and USA on 2nd July 2016, my biggest fear was no longer the face and background of Nibras Islam along with his four fellow jihadist companions posing for a photo with a joyously accomplished expression and holding weapons behind the black ISIS flag. They have all been killed by the joint army and police forces who carried out Operation Thunderbolt bringing the long-haul siege to an end. The wholesome of my fear now settled on the Nibras’s high-profile, posh network of contacts who, like Nibras, have imminently evaded any counter-terrorism radar with the same avatar of a modern liberal coming from an educated and politically elite background and with zero previous criminal convictions to be looked twice at any sufficiently secured checkpoint, branching out of elite educational institutions like where he studied as an undergraduate, North South University.

I should know, because that is the university where I spent my undergraduate years as an economics student, as a closet Ex-Muslim and an introvert who mostly kept to herself.

As I looked up Nibras’ information on Facebook, it turned out he is part of the extended network of friends and classmates I have abandoned some six years ago fearing for my own life as I gradually came out of the closet as an atheist Ex-Muslim in Britain and later became a staunch critic of what he just did – killing innocent people in a deadly mission to impose a despicable version of Islam.

Nibras is a mutual friend of at least five of my former classmates with whom I studied several economics modules. I was in good contact with them until I deleted and blocked most people from North South University on Facebook after several of my classmates from this much extended circle (their siblings/cousins are also close friends of few other IS terrorist now wanted by counter-terrorism) sent me polite reminders that they didn’t like my political activism.

I was defensive, but not worried about my safety to the point I would alert the Police. After all, these friends of mine come from good educated family, made it to Warwick, Cornell or Yale University just like me. They waited at VIP airport lounge and were served tea and coffee by virtue of their father's political background instead being randomly selected for detention. Although I had no trouble recognising the trajectory of their ambitions on Islam approached to some approximation of global Islamic caliphate - I never perceived it as a threat because it espoused the glorification of prophet Muhammad and victim-hood of Muslims bombarded by US missiles instead of invoking any killing of Kafirs in the name of Islam.

Unlike the five JMB terrorists who killed Rajib Haider, and in the greater context of the regular pattern of such attacks and profiles of the attackers in Bangladesh, these network of individuals were not from the local madrasas of a poverty-stricken borough. As much as they would impress you with the depth of their Islamic knowledge and practice, these people went to parties, drank alcohol, danced to Gangnam Style, dated white chicks, extremely talented students and determined in their career. Here is the catch: these people will not have a problem with you if you personally did not practice Islam word to word in some Sunni context. They were triggered when you would criticise any aspect of political Islam. When I pretended to be a non-practising agnostic Muslim at the very beginning of coming out of the closet, these folks were not visibly offended but would write me Facebook messages, calmly and very lovingly encouraging me to re-think my faith. Now I know, it was Dawah. But the moment they discovered I became increasingly vocal about my lack of faith and extended it further to criticise Islamic leaders on the onset of Shahbagh Movement, the backlash followed. Could these people know a friend of friend of friend who may know a friend of friend of a JMB terrorist? May be. Could they have an uncle who is an Islamist leader? May be. Could they spread lies about me so it gets difficult for me to establish my career after they expose me as an atheist? May be. Could they or their siblings be close friends of a young man who plead allegiance to ISIS, tortured women to death because their lifestyle was not modest enough and slit the throat of men just because they were not Muslim? Yes - only this time, the ''Yes'' was confirmed by facts, not my feelings of being intimidated by people I hardly agreed with.

"You are different, I will remember you", a young man from North South University (NSU) wrote me on Facebook some time mid-2008 when I just started my undergrad. I joined the campus with the vigour to enjoy all the things I imagined as a 20 year old freshman. It looked like a great escape from a conservative Muslim family where I was remained a closet Ex-Muslim for all my life. From the outlook of a westernised youthful culture where making friends regardless of sex, going out, experimenting with new ideas made it tempting for me to be open to meet new people. During 2008, you meet new people via Facebook. It was amidst this westernised culture I received a friend request from this young man at NSU. For the first few times we spoke, it was getting to know one another, finding out about studying at NSU, minor chit-chats. Then, the conversation gradually shifted towards religion. One day around 12:00 am midnight, he messaged me on Facebook offering me to buy a Hijab. His reason was something along the line of: You must protect your dignity, sister. Please, let me buy you a hijab. It will keep you pure. Look at your youth, it is a command in Islam that you hide your beauty from men. I angrily answered I do not believe in his interpretation of Islam reducing me to a lump of sexual organs. He left but his last words echoed in my ears for the rest of my undergraduate life. It was not just a fear of death, it was the fear of isolation, being hated for thinking differently, being mocked at for challenging authority, and being lonely- a photocopy of my life back with family that I wanted to avoid at NSU. So my ambitions of finding a circle who thought like me was once again trashed like my years of school life. I kept mostly to myself, except for one other time if I remember, when I posted a Wikileak article that exposed the presence of a militant group Huji-B in 2011, random guys on Facebook warned me that a powerful leader of the group studies in the same campus and therefore I should not get very excited about exposing them.

I wasn't those women who spent their spare times in the Ladies' lounge with extended prayer room, so the pipeline through which that moderate Muslim dude offered to buy me hijab was social media. For the female-only premises, there were two groups of people: a burka-clad brigade of ninja sisters, and a breathtaking sorority of hijabi and NON-HIJABI charismatic, glamorous girls that combined stiletto heels, jeans, blouse, heavy make-up. The latter group targeted liberal young women, especially from educated well-off backgrounds.

Women like Nadia who would give into peer pressure of adopting a conservative version of Islam were easy targets. Jihad, war is not about bringing people under control who agree with you. It's about conquering the minds and conscience of those whose ideology and goals are at odds with yours. Winning any war is about effectively sabotaging your most difficult targets. As far as Jihad is concerned in terms of appealing to women, it is people like me, an Ex-Muslim, before that a liberal non-Hijabi Muslim or a non-Muslim who will not easily give in if a charming Hijabi sister offers expensive bracelets on day one and a hijab on day two. If I was a Hijabi Muslim woman, by the time the ninja sisters approach me to offer me one, I would have figured out and settled on what degree I practice Islam somewhere between spending a rest of my life as a low key devout Muslim wife or seeking a career to further the politically correct agenda evoking my Muslim identity as pious character that is under threat by the ''West's war on Muslims''. If I was a secular Muslim or even a non-Muslim, I would be less likely to accept the offer to wear hijab as soon as they approach me because I would have already assumed my outlook on life and on religious views will contradict the burka/hijabi-sister from observing them thus making me already build a subconscious guard against them. It's a lot like: if you are a tobacco smoker and someone wearing a ''Smoking kills'' t-shirt approaches you, you will know what they are up to and would be somehow prepared when they bring up the topic of cancer - you will have an excuse or counter-argument ready when they try to convince you. So the best way to approach a smoker who you are trying to convert into a non-smoker is to approach with an image or impression of as you also smoke, either a tobacco cigarette or an electric cigarette. Once you have their attention in your bag, you gradually start introducing them to your experience of a healthier alternative to smoking, such as an electric cigarette or some herbal remedy. Tell them how you feel about it and why it's a better alternative. Grow their curiosity. Make them try it one day. Once they like it. Slowly introduce them to greater doses of it. Except in this case. Hijab is no healthy alternative except in a society that enforces a rape culture where you are punished with slut-shaming and rape if you don't wear it. The whole inception of hijab is birthed on the assumption that a covered woman is more worthy than an uncovered one - another reason sex slaves were kept half-naked in most civilisations and noble women were fully veiled. Such sexist drivel is also confirmed in Islamic teachings where it is viewed non-hijabi women are less pure, and less pure in the eyes of Allah and in some cases, are ''permitted to be raped''. So, people who wear their agenda on their sleeves have their reach often limited by it. That is overcome when people with agenda assimilate well with those who would rather be put off by the former group.

This is where what I previously mentioned "a sorority of hijabi and NON-HIJABI charismatic, glamorous girls that combined stiletto heels, jeans, blouse, heavy make-up" - comes into play. These are basically recruiters from rich and politically wealthy background, star students (about above 3.5 CGPA) and are very well-assimilated with secular Muslims who are not interested in radicalising you so even if you would guess they are radical and trouble, calling them out will have you brand you a anti-Muslim bigot (especially in the West). Their targets are particularly good-looking, well-assimilated, non-Hijab, liberal Muslim and non-Muslim women with high CGPA. That's how they approached me. As I became more serious about improving my CGPA, became a teaching assistant and came into the limelight among the network of top students and lecturers, a bunch of equally academically bright,career-oriented people found me strikingly fascinating and vice versa. Especially the women among them were academically bright, socially active, pretty, not necessarily wearing the hijab and westernised - they had male friends, Bollywood was the hot topic right after relationship and sex, discussion of lectures, solving macroeconomic assignments together, discussing about long term academic studies in USA or UK etc. dominated the conversation. The conversation would only drift towards religion or Islam in closed groups - when you would get on a car with four people for Nandos or shopping in the upscale area in Gulshan. The entire conversation throughout the travel would be the suffering of Muslims in Palestine, Israel being the ultimate villain and Hamas being the savior. If you got into a closed Skype chat, the discussion will gradually drift towards your long term goals after graduation - they ask you what you want to do in your life, when you plan to get married, casually asking you if you pray regularly, your thoughts on US, if you have relatives there. One way or other, they will manage to pitch in Islam into the conversation.

''Hey, it's time for Isha, are you going to pray?..No? It must be your period, lol?!"

"Haha, I think Sadiq and Parvez are gayzz lol! What do you think?"

"...I mean, my parents have no problem with me that I don't wear the hijab. I'm not sure I might at some later time. What abt you??"

"So you have a boyfriend? Does your parents know?"

The litmus test to identify where you are on the spectrum ranging from a hardcore freethinker to a hardcore Islamist is very subtly smuggled into regular conversation making it impossible to trace anything suspicious. If you are someone who talks along the line of ....

"Hmmm... I am thinking about wearing the hijab...not sure tho lol..."

Then you are likely to be gradually invited into an inner circle who are on the same page as you but some of them slowly telling you about their experience of wearing the hijab, finding the ''liberation'' in it - added, how their relationship with their boyfriend or fiance has improved with less arguments and more respect, peace out of the patience of waiting for ''that big day!'' - halal sex, they mean halal sex. They'll basically say how they feel more calm and dignified because they pleased Allah more, tactically making you feel like an idiot - and, psychologically incentivising you to wear the hijab.

In both cases, they start off by adding you on social media- soon you are flooded with a barrage of ''likes'' on selfies, food, statuses - and the conversationn starts off from one of those instances. Then you are rewarded with new friend requests from mutuals with very attractive profile and the process repeats while more people within that sorority starts documenting your character, habits, hobbies and craft the effective way to make their move. For me - I was most approachable when talking about lectures, higher studies, and gradually being asked ''Roja Rakhso?" meaning "Are you fasting?". Sending messages around Salah and asking me if I would go to pray, telling me about secret admirers I had - all coincidentally, as it now turns out, transformed devout traditional Muslim men. Nowhere during such conversation, any element of violent or non-violent Islamism was evoked. The most frequently asked questions I was ever asked at my university was ''Do you pray?" - So had I been suspicious just because I was asked general questions about practising Islamic faith, even though I would have been right to suspect them - I would have suspected them for the wrong reasons.

If I spoke somewhere along the line of ''Hijab is not mandatory in Islam"... or... "Of course I will work on my career instead of marriage, my parents don't have any problem with that!", or "oh yeah, shh, me and my boyfriend had sex!" - then the rendezvous with these recruiters will go down the line of justifying how my western lifestyle was compatible with Islam, using stories of Muhammad, narration from Quran and what not. Things like pre-marital sex, revealing dresses etc. are usually justified if you gradually shift wards a more conservative Islamic lifestyle and once you express an ounce of admittance of that or any interest it in, the gradual process to radicalise you begins - OR, if you are one of them planning to assimilate into the Western culture in USA or Canada fuelling the now rampant politically correct agenda as an integrated liberal Muslim.

As a liberal woman, you will obviously find it ridiculous if someone befriends you out of the blue only to preach you about wearing the hijab, refraining from sexual intimacy before marriage scaremongering you with unnecessary fear of hell or cursing; you would think they are crazy. The path is, like the smoking analogy, to make you curious about Islam by first baffling you with the idea that Islam is modern and tolerant and then taking you through every example and experience to convince you, gradually evoke an emotional bond to it either by relating your identity as a Muslim woman or relating it to Muslim victims in Syria and Iraq by US military forces, using Islamic history to draw parallel between Muhammad's time and present time, and showing proof of Islamic predictions coming true - it is all about selling you an impression and the impression creates more demand for the ideology. Once you have bought the anti-Western propaganda like one of Gulshan's ISIS attackers, the induction begins: routinely introducing more and more politics and Islamic philosophy into a friendly gossip packed with sex, relationships, marriage, shopping, Bollywood, going out. Identifying your weakness – such, if you were like me complaining about strained family relationship, the dawah will be praying and using certain Surah to sort it out along with relationship advice; buying you expensive gifts, paying your bills at Radisson. Whether you score on either side of the litmus test of chitchats such as “Does Iraq war caused more terrorism, or did terrorism led to Iraq war”, the goal of this subtle recruiting group is to bend you. If they can’t bend you, they’ll try to break you.

How do they break you? It's a non-surprising climate of bullying and isolation at the top tier of elite, academically powerful students and teacher: rumours spread from your haters, to their favourite lecturers who would share the same ideology. If you are unlucky, they will write you shitty academic reference letters making any chances of getting a postgraduate offer in the Western universities impossible. The agenda is to occupy the limited quota of foreign students in the West with pro-Islam graduates in economics, computer science or any subjects - previously having lead local university societies as presidents and vice presidents, their next destination is joining the student societies in the Western universities, such as Warwick SU or Goldsmith ISOC. Now, under the umbrella of multiculturalism, they meet people from a diverse background - gay activists, hindu activists, bloggers plugged into the Black Lives Matter movements, etc. No, they don't tell their new friends that drinking at campus ale festival is haram, or that sex is sinful - they participate in as many social meetings they can. Their goal is not to spread dawah shamign liberals for living a non-Islamic lifestyle, their goal is to import a Sunni version of Islam justifying hijab, radicalisation of British youth, terrorism superimposed by a climate where Western invasion of Muslim lands are seen as a fair justification: importing the politically correct notion that any criticism of Islam is racism and ''Islamophobia'' making a case for deplatforming secular Muslim and Ex-Muslim activists. These emigrant (undergraduate and) postgraduate Masters and PhD students therefore dominate the conversation not just in student societies, but also in social science and political science departments. If you are a white middle class gay student, they'll make you feel at home while paying your expensive bill at Nandos - it's nothing for them. At this point, you are convinced Quran says nothing about punishing homosexuals so Goldsmith FemSOC or LGTQ+ society will happily back the heckling of Maryam Namazie.

You may have thought joining Warwick made me safer and I no longer had to worry about those neo-Islamists. Well, Parvez and Shahin went to Warwick with me, and they were plugged into the network of well-educated Bangladeshi postgraduate masters and PhD students who entered Britain without an ounce of threat to national security and a fraction of it was further plugged in to the network of Islamist sleeper cells in UK that in turn connected to the rest of the world. Never bothering to go to the mosque regularly, frequent visitor of strip clubs, spending money on alcohol, weed, cigarettes, and extremely determined to go up the career and academic ladder soliciting excellent reference letters from Western professors and being top graduate candidates for the job market - it is incredibly easy for them to bluff any counter-terrorism and police radar. If they invite you into closed Skype chats, the conversation will heavily center on career and academic excellence - among those 7 to 10 Skype contacts, some three or four will have their eyes on you. Some, posing as agnostic secular, will try to find out whether you stand as an atheist, some approaching you as traditional Muslim would like to double check you are on the same page as them. They just won't grab you for radicalisation - they spend about three to four months observing your character, habits, political views - and importantly, finding who your friends are. Among your friend list, they'll try to reach out to the non-Muslims and white ones by replying to their Facebook comment or finding out Facebook events where they are most like to turn up. With increasingly loose security settings for ''mutual friends'' on Facebook, it gradually became easy for them.

Apparently, this network (again) found me in three ways: first, through Parvez, Nadia who now settled in Canada, and Shahin. Second, after I attended protests against Islamists that were filled with Islamist informants posing as "secularists", and third, when I was back in Bangladesh looking for coaching centres of GRE and IELTS tutors - now it all turns out a mesh of network that formed a very intricate part of the larger network of young, academically bring students who apply for student visa potentially planning to settle abroad in the West. Whether it was university or coaching centres, recruiters for one militant group or other fished for bright students in all of them: if it's not a traditionally Muslim bride then it's a woman who would further the agenda of promoting Islam or a politically correct environment to shield Islam from legitimate criticism in the West. Among men, they generally sought those with programming skills, engineering skills, supply chain management degrees or those studying medicine, biochemistry or chemistry alone (can you guess why?). By the time I made it to the UK and became more active in protests against Islamists in 2013, the charismatic, the friendly, the single and the good-looking ones among the network became increasingly interested in my social life - facebook events I will RSPV to attend, people who commented on my posts, photos, etc. These people, never, for once ever tried to preach anything Islamic to me to suspect - the message was hidden within jokes in Skype group chats (because they wanted to see my reaction when one joked ''Bomb them all" referring to America where his friend got a student visa). The only cue I had was the increasing pattern of them trying to reach out to me in extraordinarily friendly demeanor when I gradually became more vocal against Islamism: inviting me to excessive dinner and lunch, and wanting to find out if I was fucking men before marriage. If I had suspected a bunch of men and women in Denim jeans, tops, and Adidas knickers because they were caring about my well-being while trying skydiving just because they are Muslim, THAT would be somethig racist. What put me off was a combination of several factors: the top men running the network who posed to incoming students as credible senior figures advising on higher education, career and eventually taking us to closed Skype and Facebook groups introducing to a group of 8 to 10 men & women some of whom had some whacky worldview through the Islamic lens, sneering jokes about me drinking alcohol, having male non-Muslim friends teasing me as if I was dating them, unbrindled curiosity about where I live, if I live alone, calling me a racist because I wasn't interested in any of these modern ''brothers'' from my own country and the pattern - most importantly, the pattern of their conversation that paralleled not with my other variables of lifestyle but my interest in political activism - 6 months down the line of settling in UK. A pattern that was missing up until that point, and yeah - that one joke by a guy screaming "Bomb them all" aimed at United States. It was just a joke and after about one year, it made sense. Quazi Mohammad Ahsanullah, also from North South University and a member of the same higher study network, was arrested in 2012 for planning to bomb the Federal Reserve Bank in US. Having known few powerful faces in Bangladesh academia to whom the Bangladeshi outgoing students appeal to, it didn't take me a second guess to figure where Quazi found the motivation from.

The senior members in these Islamist network, now appearing to recruit young men (and women) for ISIS, must have remained dormant for at least 10 years - focusing on career, postgraduate study to gain enough credibility within their social circle, at the same time, with that credibility, they make themselves appealing to young incoming students who are on the look out for internships, graduate jobs and research work. 10 years is your general waiting time to apply for citizenship in US, Canada, Australia - with strong academic profile, reputable personality, married with newborn - patience makes it incredibly easy for you to settle abroad. Once you are settled, you are now a reliable addition to the dormant Islamist network. Stability is the key. You not only recruit young men and women, because language barrier and your covert methods prevents the West from knowing what you are up to, you are probably just known for your dedication as a PhD student or a graduate teaching assistant, or a great public speaker on the link between terrorism and mental - if you are into political activism though.

The greater part of this recruitment is to fill the finite work-place and educational institution spots only with graduate/undergraduate students and lecturers who think like them when it comes to political Islam and geopoltics relating to US invasion of Iraq, Syria etc. Does it ring a bell? Like my friend Parvez and Nadia warned me, being a staunch critic of Islamism making fun of Osama Bin Laden meant no senior brothers would be interested to pass my CV to an economics professor for research assistantship, nor any professor with a certain religious bent will write me a reference letter to apply for future master's study... unlike a classmate of mine who, filled their facebook timeline with posts sympathising Osama Bin Laden that eventually vanished when they travelled to the UK after securing Commonwealth scholarship.

In West, the news of employees being fired from job for refusing to remove the hijab embody the business model of media companies. In the East, you won't even know that knowing your academic concepts is hardly sufficient to get you enough CGPA to get a postgraduate offer from Cornell or Harvard. Unless you are lucky to find an unbiased and honest professors which Bangladesh universities has fallen short of recently, the easiest way for you score a 90% score not only meant you studied hard, but advertised your face and name to your lecturer with frequent visit to the office usually impressing them with the surprising coincidence of how much your Islamic ideology is just like them. Well, that used to be inside gossip, until several lecturers from North South University were discovered to be nurturing Islamic militancy. A shocker to the nation, not to me necessarily - it was no news that the ladder from Bangladesh's private university to an internationally prominent one like Yale or Toronto University were a made of days when anyone would have to pretend to be a modest Muslim because no one writes a reference letter to an Ex-Muslim atheist, or a staunch critic of Al-Qaeda nor would think they are smart enough to obtain a pass mark in final exams no matter how good a student they are. So unless you are lucky enough to find few of the remaining good teachers left who would give you an unbiased score on your competency, you really had to work hard on your charisma as a Muslim. This is where lecturers like Hasnat Karim and numerous others come into play. With links to various Islamic militancy groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Shibir, and Jamaat-e-Islami, these lecturers fished for young, intelligent students who aspired to study in the West. Warwick University, Manchester University, Harvard or Yale - you name it, you cannot get into a even a low-ranking university without good reference letters, and these lecturers with militant ties as well as having completed their masters and PhD from Western Universities made sure the privilege was reserved for those who would be of use to the global Islamism agenda. This is your starting point to groom outgoing students who would later blow your minds as graduates and newly appointed associate professors for prominent Western academic departments and think tanks discovering breakthrough research on the link between Islamic terrorism and US foreign policies, or between Islamists shooting gay people and mental health. But never between Islam's core Jihadi doctrines and terrorism.

The reason the Gulshan Attack is something any reader concerned about terrorism in the West should read is because it is not a local isolated attack. It was a large-scale major operation of ISIS that was coordinated from India, Syria, planned Malaysia, arms exported via India, financed through India and Nepal, endorsed by ISIS's senior commander in Syria, and inspired by one the most notorious preacher in the UK. Planning a year-long, large-scale attack, transferring money required to buy weapons, transferring them, transacting about £3,000 -£5,000 and coordinating each and every step between 10 people spread across India, Syria, Bangladesh and sending information back and forth across two continents meant using a lot of data over radio technology. Yet, failing to intercept any credible intelligence by counter-terrorism forces implies the extent to which the terrorists have upgraded their nature of cybersecurity in the shadows. Well for starters, as I began to read more about the attackers, I thought may be masterminds behind these attackers have set up their own companies and brought their own servers, have a handful of IT graduates who can obtain license to create their own app with end-to-end encryption and maintains a database of people updating time to time because it helps focus on the target. It was a hunch that emerged from the days when I met people from my former university and social network - they were IT graduates, some senior friends resided in USA and by virtue of being brown-skinned Muslim it must have been incredibly easy to obtain license to set up business, buy their own server and create apps before they scream "Islamphobia" at any kind of security vetting.

Ah well, it was a hunch from the bitter experience of being an Ex-Muslim in a mesh of liberal westernised Muslims who loved Big Mac but joked about bombing New York, remember? And as I looked up Nibras' network and discovered bunch of his friends being mutual friends of three to five of my friends including Parvez, Sahin and Nadia, the hunch made sense. As more and more ISIS terrorists turned out be close mutual friends of people I once called friends, sadly, my hunches came to a full circle. Sad because these hunches I held on to that eventually forced me to abandon my former friends and family fearing for my own life, emerged from an understanding that thinking my classmates can be terrorists or terrorist-sympathisers just because of their faith indeed made me feel like an anti-Muslim racist. The reaction which I identified as racist and anti-Muslim all this time turned out to be spot on, rational and scary. Had I contacted counter-terrorism because one day Parvez and Shahin messaged me trying to ''rescue'' me back to Islam with their personal experience of Islam, the police would rightfully find no apparent threat and it would have me brand as the ultimate Islamophobic villain: profiling a friend because of his faith. Nibras was a friend of Parvez, his sibling and his cousins. And by the time Parvez tried to ''rescue me back to Islam'', Nibras was well into the network where he was about to be radicalised. Had I gone to the Police in UK that Parvez's friends are potential ISIS terrorists who will kill 20 people in two years time, based on my observation that Parvez was just a moderate Muslim just politely expressing his own experience of the faith especially without ever espousing any violent views, it would be me accused of Islamophobia spending few days behind the bars for hate speech, just as the contemporary politically correct landscape would have it.

I thought my days of security concerns are over after abandoning my former academic network. I'm no stranger to getting abusive messages and death threats by virtue of being an Ex-Musilm. But some six to eight months ago, about three to five people from my former network suddenly messaged me after four years . And another unknown man left me a message assuring me I can never harm Islam no matter how much I try. It must be random stalking by useless people, so I barely paid attention. Once I discovered Nibras' Facebook network after the Gulshan Attack, it all came to a full circle: all these men who contacted me are from the immediate network of Nibras and at least three of his ISIS terrorist fellows.

Had these men not chosen the path of Jihad, they would have ended up like Parvez and his other friends settling in a competitive career. Finding their niche of like-minded brothers and sisters in Texas or Canada, who on one hand were determined to go up the career ladder, and at the same time, created a strong professional network based on their narrow version of Islamic ideology (something like a cartel) ensuring only the CVs of their brothers and sisters ends up on the desk of recruiters in the HR department - gradually occupying the workplace with like-minded people to promote a specific agenda - good enough to attract research funds. If you are not familiar with it, such patterns pops up in cities of Bangladesh, Pakistan or Qatar all the time. Perhaps you will be familiar with a more visible phenomena. But the first victims of such subtle corruption is not Ex-Muslims or non-Muslims but Muslims themselves who seek a reputable career to run away from the very tentacles of Islamism that now grips the Western world almost everywhere.

The general perception among staunch followers of Sunni Islam is an irrational dislike of Hindus because they worship Idols, Bollywood because it celebrates haraam mixing of genders with dance and music, an aversion of Western technologies coming from infidels. But Jihad must be above all. It must be a combination of factors that made intercepting prior intelligence on the Gulshan Attack extremely difficult: the attackers used at least 20 end-to-end encryption apps before and after the attack. To avoid the detection of money transfer, the attackers used the illegal hundi system generally run by Hindu merchants. And if you think you could have deterred them by playing Bollywood music, these new breed of terrorists had no problem enjoying the infidels dancing and singing, knowing how to assimilate into a liberal westernised culture, after all, this is the very culture where they emerged from.

Some people ask me: why are you an activist, Rayhana? I have many answers, but the one that I learned at the aftermath of the Gulshan Attack is that, if a young Muslim man named Faraz can sacrifice his life trying to defend his friends without blinded by which religion they were from, I can at least blog about it.

The Gulshan Attack not just shocked the entire world and shook the very core of the Bangladeshi community where I come from. It crushed the pride I held all these years coming from an educated and well-respected background. It was a sense of accomplishment to spend my undergraduate years at a university whose students were not known for vandalising local shops, terrorism from petty madrasa, extortion by local gangs and dirty politics unlike local public universities. It was a sense of dignity when I represented myself as a student of North South University in Britain. And with one act of terror and a streak of discovery, my years of hunch and paranoia that was built solely feeling of isolation as an Ex-Muslim turned into pattern recognition. My fears came to a full circle. My long-held pride, accomplishment, dignity - all of them crushed. The idea that people I once shared a classroom with can murder innocent people with the pull of a trigger and strike of a machete made me feel betrayed.

The Gulshan Attack is nothing like Bangladesh has seen before. And no intelligence was picked before the cutting-edge technology of India, or Malaysia or even United Kingdom was yet to catch up with pace of communication of these ISIS attackers and its liberal westernised friends that has now dispersed across Europe and Australia with postgraduate degrees from places like Toronto University, Yale, or Cambridge. Should any of these people be planning an attack in 2018, they must have already settled in the country side or quiet suburbs of Canada, such as Calgary known to be hotbed of radicalisation also the place where ISIS mastermind Tamim hailed from before secretly settling in Dhaka's not-so-in-the-news Naryanganj from where he coordinated the attack. With excellent career profile and a good degree, it must be not be difficult for them to find work in the West, especially if they seek a job that allows access to personal details of thousands of people, like Nibras who worked at Monash University's Student Union, or like one of these people who made it to UK, works at a local council and knows my face - so it is not a coincidence he easily guessed I belonged in the same borough and my address history was just few flicks away on his computer. Not a coincidence, unknown folks appearing to be of South Asian origin are now more than frequent visitors in my neighbourhood.

The takeaway from the investigation of the Gulshan Attack so far is that: in the Jihad against infidels, the major militant groups have galvanised together for one cause: work towards establishing a caliphate. But the strategies to achieve it are many folds. ISIS could have used terrorists from its stock of poorer disposable madrasa students to carry out the same attack - in the local context, unintegrated, uneducated boys from village madrasas who failed to integrate to the westernised city life of Dhaka. But ISIS chose recruits from elite, educated background - son of political leaders and businessmen. It sent the memo to my country that a ticking time bomb of a greater influx of upcoming attackers is sitting within the very top tier of the economic class that maintains the country's political and social stability.

But perhaps there is another memo that the Western world missed: it is educated, well-spoken people from this network, dressed in Marks & Spencer rather than traditional Muslim garb that has now immigrated and assimilated to every reachable corners in UK, USA, Canada, Australia... you name it. In a political landscape where the far right fails to separate criticism of Musilms from criticism of Islam and far left that conflates both, this is going to be a new challenge for West's counterterrorism to find the potential terrorists and informants among the intricacies of an increasingly diverse society, without mistaking an innocent Muslim for an ISIS terrorist and therefore making a total fiasco giving the media outlets another new content to make revenues off the "Islamophobia meme" at the expense of the policing credibility of Western counter-terrorism forces.

It is handy for ISIS to select an asylum seeker, or a refugee or an immigrant to carry out the next terrorist attack because it adds momentum to the far right's racism against Muslims that drives the engine of far-left's victimhood complex that further shields Islam from any legitimate criticism and smear counter-terrorism campaigns branding them as racism against Muslims. The eventual anti-Muslim sentiment in the West does an excellent service feeding into Islam's long-held prediction that rising anti-Muslim sentiment should be a sign of Jihad and further legitimising Islam to Muslims through the lens of Islam's rhetorical predictions. This might be an incentive for ISIS to select immigrants or refugees to inspire its next terrorist attack.

With a spotless profile of having no previous criminal convictions, coming from elite backgrounds, and further having their visas sponsored by top Universities, these new breed of ISIS terrorists are potential candidate for large-scale attack because they are not in the counter-terrorism radar. Unlike unintegrated, uneducated "rag-heads" with no cultural understanding of Western values who barely made it accross the Mediterranean, these neo-Jihdists are perfectly integrated, well-versed in English and other languages making them fit for high-skilled jobs in Canary Wharf or Westminster. Themselves with dual nationality such as the ISIS terrorist Tamiam who is a Canadian citizen, their relatives are likely British and knows top lawywers, like the son of Islamist war criminal Saiful Qader Chowdhury who lobbied hard with Human Rights Watch to overturn the death penalty, along with reaching out to celebrity journalists on his personal Facebook page to appeal against the decision. These new Jihadists are skilled in advanced programming, or studying a degree in supply chain management, or law, or journalism - even if they don't wind up as a terrorist, they add value to the covert infrastructure of ISIS within the Western world that largely remains in the shadows. In their social life, they go to strip clubs, gay bars and enjoy the Saturday night drinking and checking out potential partners for the weekend. You cannot profile these people just because I identified them with my line of reasoning, or because they are Muslim or that they are brown-skinned Asians- all three would be racist. And if you let them off the hook because they are perfectly integrated, you will be missing links that will be play a vital role in your counter-terrorism radar in years to come - just as it turned out to be for Bangladesh: terrorists who slipped the radar as harmless moderate Muslims turned out to be ISIS recruits and recruiters.

The right answers to tackle the global Jihadist insurgency is not known, at least to me. But I know what the wrong answer is: at least, the wrong answer is viewing the 1.5 billion Muslim community as a glob of traditional Sunni Muslim as identical to Islamist militants and putting collective blame on all Muslims for the atrocities caused by a subset of them, Islamists, who vows to impose political Islam on the rest of the society. It is not only racist to view 1.5 billion as a terrorist by the far-right and being held to a sub-standard of tribal customs and poor hygiene by the far-left, but dehumanising them in such way does nothing to curb the root mechanism of radicalisation and terrorism. The masterminds behind the most successful global terrorism enterprise are not refugees but get the most grand welcome as West's most strongest allies. When they do fund flying planes through buildings, FBI themselves will ensure they are not arrested.

It is nonetheless must be a top priority to secure country's border to prevent potential terrorists from entering Europe at the same time ensuring Muslims who respect secular values and are not a potential threat to the West must be offered the rights to asylum and economic opportunities through which they can give back to the economy at the same time resettling in a new, better life. Profiling by race and previous convictions to vet the border will always be a caveat for border security and like many of the time, it will fail.