DHAKA: Well-educated and hailing from wealthy families, the gunmen who killed 20 hostages in a Bangladesh cafe defy the increasingly outdated stereotype of militants from poor backgrounds who have been radicalised in madrassas.
Six young men were shot dead Saturday at the end of the all-night siege in a Dhaka cafe claimed by the militant Islamic State (IS) group.
One may have been an innocent bystander, but among the remaining five are a graduate of Bangladesh's leading private university, an 18-year-old student at an elite school and the son of a ruling party official.
As militant groups such as IS focus their recruitment efforts on disenfranchised middle class youth, government efforts to eradicate extremism become ever more complicated.
"They are all highly educated young men and from well-off families," Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told AFP.
Asked why they would have become militants, Khan said: "It has become a fashion."
While the Bangladesh government has continued to deny IS has a foothold in the country, the group claimed the attack and its associated news agency, Amaq, posted pictures of the five gunmen posing with weapons.
Similarly in militancy-ravaged Pakistan, the government denies that the international militant network has a formal presence in the country.
But a Pakistani security official recently told AFP that authorities had busted several IS recruitment cells focused on a similar affluent demographic.
Taj Hashmi, a Bangladeshi who teaches security studies at the Austin Peay State University in the United States, pointed out that many of the Saudi hijackers behind the September 11 attacks were also from wealthy families.
But he says that middle-class youth have been providing Islamist terror groups with footsoldiers since long before the emergence of IS.