FOR four days all eyes in Bangladesh were on Atia Mahal, a lime-green, five-floor apartment block in the north-eastern city of Sylhet. The police cordoned off the building on March 24th after receiving word that a group of Islamic militants had holed up in one of its flats. But it was only on March 27th that a special anti-terrorism unit managed to kill the last of the four besieged terrorists. Two days earlier, one of the four had put on a suicide-vest and blown himself up at the police cordon some 400 metres from the hideout, killing six people and injuring 50. It was the first indiscriminate suicide-attack on civilians in Bangladesh.

Islamic State, the jihadist group that runs a dwindling portion of Syria and Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attack, its 28th in Bangladesh since 2015. The deadliest of those was an assault on a restaurant in Dhaka, the capital, last year, in which 22 civilians, two policemen and five terrorists were killed. The government insists—to near-universal disbelief—that the perpetrators are a new faction of a home-grown group called Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh. Either way, the government does seem to be pursuing with vigour the directive of the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, to “root out militancy”. But the siege in Sylhet was preceded by three botched suicide-attacks in the previous two weeks. The security services recently killed six militants in a raid in the southern city of Chittagong. And two sieges of suspected jihadists are now under way in the city of Moulvibazar, to the south of Sylhet.

The government seems to have had great success in persuading ordinary citizens to report suspected militants. But its appeasement of extreme religious groups such as Hefazat-e-Islam, which share much of the militants’ worldview, is at odds with the crackdown. Foreigners are frightened (17 of the victims of the restaurant attack were foreign). Cafés they frequent now sport airport-style security.

Bangladesh’s neighbour, India, will also be worried. This month its Border Security Force warned that more than 3,000 militants had entered India across its border with Bangladesh, the world’s fifth-longest. India has three main security concerns: that Bangladesh is a haven for various insurgent groups fighting the Indian government; that large numbers of illegal migrants from Bangladesh are changing the ethnic and religious character of the border areas; and that Bangladesh is turning away from its long history of secularism and tolerance. Sheikh Hasina has tried to suppress the insurgents using Bangladesh as a base for operations in India, with some success. But she is powerless to stop migration and her decision to suppress mainstream opposition groups has seen extremist fringes thrive.