New Delhi: India has started maintaining closer watch on the goings-on in Bangladesh after the recovery of the body of a US citizen in a room of the Westin Hotel in Dhaka on August 31.
Terrence Arvelle Jackson, whose body was found, was no American tourist or businessman. He was the Command Inspector General for the 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne).
The 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) or 1SFC (A) is a division-level operations forces unit under the United States Army Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). The mission of 1SFC (A) is to organise, equip, train and validate forces to conduct full-spectrum special operations in support of USSOCOM, Geographic Combatant Commanders, American ambassadors and other government agencies.
USSOCOM has the ability to rapidly deploy a high-level headquarters to run sustained, unconventional campaigns in foreign theatres.
Jackson’s body has been handed over to the US embassy in Dhaka by the local police without an autopsy. While the US has remained tight-lipped, questions are being raised within intelligence circles regarding his presence in Bangladesh. Authorities in Dhaka have confirmed that he was in Bangladesh ‘on a business trip’ for the last few months.
Whether a serving US Army officer can engage in ‘business’, that too in a foreign country, for months, is not known, but Jackson’s LinkedIn profile reveals that he had no plans to leave the Army for two more years.
The US’ interest in the Rakhine Corridor is well known. In May this year, even as Operation Sindoor was underway along India’s western theatre, an US Air Force team of specialists had reached Dhaka ahead of the landing of a ‘large and sensitive cargo’ by air.
The team was headed by Tara Lynn Alexzandria Stryder, who is the director of logistics, Supply Chain and Planning. She is said to have the US’ highest security clearance, ‘TS/SCI’, or Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Intelligence. Stryder is known to be a “Combat mission support commander”.
The team had also put up at the Westin Hotel in Dhaka’s upscale Gulshan.
While Md Yunus, chief advisor of the interim government in Bangladesh is in favour of the Rakhine Corridor that the United Nations (UN) claims would help in sending aid to civilians in northern Rakhine, the proposal has been shot down by the Bangladesh Army. Its chief Gen Waqar-uz-Zaman has made it clear that there will be no such ‘bloody corridor’.
While the US wants to use the UN’s narrative of a supply route to northern Rakhine to maintain a military presence close to Myanmar’s border with China, Gen Zaman doesn’t want the country to end up like Pakistan that allowed the US to operate on its soil against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Both India and China are also against the Rakhine Corridor. For India, it will mean American military presence close to the northeastern states.
