DHAKA, July 22 (Xinhua) -- Amid growing fears about hundreds of missing individuals including doctors, engineers and pilots turning up as terrorists, Bangladesh media outlets have also recently reported that an entire family from the capital city of Dhaka has now disappeared.
The family of five including pediatrician Khandaker Rokonuddin, 50, his wife Naima Akhter, 45, daughters Rezwana Rokon, 23, and Ramita Rokon, 15, and son-in-law Saad Qayes, 30, left Dhaka in October last year and made their way to an Islamic State-held territory in Syria, local reports stated.
Md Ashequr Rahman, who came to be known by the alias Jilani, a former student from Dhaka's Military Institute of Science and Technology student, went missing in February last year. His family in Dhaka later came to know that he too had joined the so-called Islamic State and was killed during a battle in Ayn Issa, in northern Syria.
Similarly, Nazibullah Ansari, a marine engineer, who went missing in January last year, posted a Facebook message to his brother saying, "Don't worry, I'm in Iraq for Jihad."
"I have gone off the grid," Tahmid Rahman Shafi told his mother after leaving Dhaka for Malaysia from where he went on to join IS in Syria. Shafi, once a singer, and his wife went to Malaysia last year under the false pretenses of taking their honeymoon.
He is one of the three Bangla-speaking youths who threatened more attacks on Bangladesh in a new video reportedly released by the Islamic State about a week after the country's first-ever hostage crisis on July 1.
As more and more news is released about the increasing numbers of young people reported missing and subsequently joining terrorist groups, at dinner tables, family gatherings, business meetings and even at tea stalls, people here are talking with mounting fear about the likelihood of more terror attacks.
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