Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is reportedly working to unite three Bangladesh-based terrorist organisations into a single, more lethal entity — a move that Indian intelligence officials warn could dramatically raise the threat level along the country's eastern border, particularly for West Bengal and the northeastern states.

The Three Groups in Focus

According to intelligence officials, the ISI has long nurtured three groups operating out of Bangladesh: Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), and Neo-JMB. While each organisation shares a stated objective of targeting India, officials say they individually lack the operational capacity for large-scale attacks. The ISI's stated goal, according to officials, is to build their combined capabilities along the lines of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) — both of which have carried out several deadly attacks on Indian soil.

Why the ISI Is Pushing for a Merger Now

Officials say the ISI's pivot to the eastern front is driven partly by the increasing difficulty of operating along the western border with India. An Intelligence Bureau official said the three Bangladesh-based groups, despite following the same radical ideology, have a tendency to operate on each other's turf. 'This has caused confusion when it comes to operations and very often also caused a rift. Such overlapping is hurting these groups, and hence they have not been able to scale up,' the official said.

The ISI is now revisiting a 2019 proposal by the alleged chief of the JMB, Salehuddin Saleh, who had suggested a three-way merger to strengthen collective operational capacity. The ISI believes consolidating the groups under a single umbrella would replicate the model it uses for Jaish and Lashkar — organisations that, according to officials, are kept under strict ISI command and rarely overlap in their targeting.

Post-Operation Sindoor: A New Template

Officials noted that the ISI's push for coordination among Bangladesh groups mirrors what reportedly happened after Operation Sindoor. 'After Operation Sindoor last year, Pakistan brought both these groups to operate together. At the launchpads in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), operatives of the Lashkar, Jaish and Hizbul Mujahideen work in tandem. In case they do manage to infiltrate, operations in Jammu and Kashmir would be carried out jointly,' the official said.

The Obstacle: Neo-JMB's Bitter Past

Despite the ISI's ambitions, officials say the primary hurdle is the Neo-JMB. The group was formed after a bitter split from the original JMB — a rupture driven by leadership disputes, ideological differences, and the global rise of the Islamic State. While the JMB had aligned itself with Al-Qaeda, a faction within it was drawn to the Islamic State's more radical ideology and its rapid global expansion, eventually breaking away to form Neo-JMB. Officials say the ABT may be open to a merger with the JMB, but bringing Neo-JMB into the fold remains a significant challenge.

The ISI is said to be directly engaging the leadership of all three groups to paper over these divisions. Officials caution that if even one group stays out of the merger, it could not only undermine the plan but actively disrupt the operations of the others.

Implications for India's Eastern Border Security

Indian officials are watching the developments closely. If the proposed merger materialises, security agencies warn it would place a significantly heavier burden on policing the India-Bangladesh border and tracking cross-border networks that feed into West Bengal and the Northeast. This comes amid an already complex security environment in the region, where porous borders and existing radical networks have long been a concern for Indian counterterrorism agencies.

Whether the ISI can overcome the deep-seated animosities between the three groups remains to be seen, but officials say the directness of its current engagement with group leadership marks an escalation from previous, less hands-on efforts.