For the past year, Bangladesh’s government and political commentators have spent a lot of time speculating about whether the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has a presence in the country. This month’s bloody attack at an upscale café in Dhaka’s diplomatic zone registered telltale signs of the form of terrorism common to transnational terrorist organizations such as ISIS.

While it is still unclear if the attackers had received training or concrete direction from the Islamic State, it is evident that the local militants have embraced its distinctive variant of militant Islam and have established communication with central ISIS. The massacre in Dhaka was followed by another attack at the country’s largest Eid prayer congregation. If the first attack was defined by the strategy of killing foreigners, the second one signals the emergence of a growing sectarianism within various claimants of “true Islam.”

Both of these actions represent the logic of transnational militancy and have altered the frame of terror attacks in Bangladesh. Until the outbreak of such ostensibly ISIS-emulating terror, the broad focus of militant Islamist politics has been targeted killing of “atheist bloggers” in the cities and religious minorities in the provinces. Indeed, the practice of targeted killing itself is a novel phenomenon that emerged only in the aftermath of the Shahbag Movement in 2013.