A Windsor man is reportedly leading a Daesh-affiliated terrorist group in Bangladesh.

According to the Bangladesh newspaper the Daily Star, Tamim Chowdhury, who goes by the name Shaykh Abu Ibrahim Al-Hanif, is leading a group of militants in Bangladesh closely linked to Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Chowdhury, identified as “Bangladeshi-Canadian” by the Daily Star report, is originally from Windsor, according to Amarnath Amarasingam, a post-doctoral fellow in the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University and expert on international terrorism.

“He was definitely from Windsor. I spoke to a few people who knew him from the city. But not much else is known about him,” Amarasingam said in an email.

The Windsor Islamic Association said they could not confirm if Chowdhury was heading a Daesh-affiliate in Bangladesh.

“We can confirm that Tamim Chowdhury was from Windsor, though he was not a well-known individual in the community,” WIA spokesperson Lina Chaker said.

The report comes at a time when Daesh and similar Islamic extremist groups have claimed responsibility for a wave of violence in Bangladesh, including the high-profile killing ofa university professor in April and a string of attacks on religious and secular figures this week — with several victims hacked to death in the street.

The Bangladeshi government maintains Daesh has no presence in the country.

In a recent interview with Daesh’s English-language propaganda magazine Daqib, Chowdhury talks about what he sees as his mission in Bangladesh.

In it, Chowdhury says Bangladesh is strategically important for Daesh.

“Having a strong jihad base in Bengal will facilitate performing guerrilla attacks inside India simultaneously from both sides,” he says.

Though Chowdhury spends most of the interview boasting about his group’s strength in Bangladesh, he also makes mention of its “lack of numbers” and “lack of military strength.”

The interview, which runs over eight pages, makes no mention of Canada.

Those in Windsor who knew Chowdhury are shocked by the news, Amarasingam said.

“One of his friends described him as a nice guy who was generally pretty shy. He couldn’t believe it when I told him the news,” he said.

Chowdhury would not be the first Canadian to join Daesh. Young Canadians, mostly men, have left to fight for it and other Islamic extremist groups for years, including Damian Clairmont, originally from Calgary, who joined the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate and rival of Daesh in Syria.

Clairmont was killed fighting in Syria in 2014. His mother, Christianne Boudreau, says she understands the pain Chowdhury’s family must be feeling.

“You’re trying to cope with an immense amount of anger, grief, so many different kinds of emotion,” she said.

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“It affects absolutely everything in your entire life.”

Boudreau has since started a group, Mothers for Life, which connects mothers who have lost their children to violent extremism in the absence of support by governments. Boudreau said she hopes Chowdhury’s family reaches out to her or her group if they need support.

“It doesn’t matter what stage they’re in — whether they just realized he’s gone (or whether they’ve known for a while) . . . the amount of emotions they’re dealing with, and having to hide it, for fear of losing their jobs or being ostracized by the community . . . It’s a very long, dark place to be.”

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