Islamic State is infiltrating SE Asia
The Jakarta attacks were claimed by IS and show it is seeking a new theatre of war, write Joe Cochrane and Thomas Fuller
The Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the terrorist attacks in the Indonesian capital on Thursday, raising the spectre of an expanded presence by the group in Southeast Asia. The Syrian civil war has been a source of inspiration for violent Islamists in Indonesia, and hundreds have travelled to Syria to join the IS over the past several years. But recently they appear to have sought targets closer to home. Extremists claiming to represent the IS carried out small-scale attacks in Indonesia and the Philippines last year.
“In the last six months, we’ve seen a spike of planning for violence in Indonesia,” said Sidney Jones, a terrorism expert and the director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Jakarta. “It’s a desire to prove that jihadi groups are still alive and well in Indonesia and are committed to carrying out the ISIS agenda.”
In Thursday’s attacks in the centre of Jakarta, militants targeted a police traffic post near an affluent shopping area, then set off explosions in an apparent suicide attack outside a nearby Starbucks coffee shop. At least seven people were killed, including five of the assailants, and 23 people were injured, the police said.
The IS took responsibility for the attack in a statement released on its official Telegram channel, an encrypted phone app.
Gen Tito Karnavian, chief of the Jakarta Provincial Police and the former head of the country’s elite national police counterterrorism unit, said at a news conference Thursday that the perpetrators were linked to leaders of the IS in Raqqa, Syria, and warned that the group was expanding its operations across the region, including in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.
He identified the organiser as an Indonesian citizen believed to be in Syria. The suspect, Bahrun Naim, is a leader of Katibah Nusantara, a Southeast Asian-based military unit under the IS, Gen Karnavian said. The police appear to have been aware of Bahrun for some time.
At least 16 terrorism suspects have been arrested in Indonesia in the past month alone, and the police said they received information in late November that the IS was planning “a concert” in Indonesia, possibly meaning an attack.
Despite the fear caused by gunfire and blasts in the middle of a major Asian city, the limited casualties on Thursday raised questions about the terrorists’ destructive capabilities. The police said the explosives used were small bombs or grenades, much less powerful than those used in previous attacks in the country, including one in which a large car bomb on the resort island of Bali in 2002 killed more than 200 people, the vast majority of them foreigners.
Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, with a tradition of tolerance toward other religions. A tiny fraction of the population is radicalised, analysts say, but in recent years, the country has grappled with rising tensions between moderates and hard-line groups, some of them peaceful and others militant, promoting what they say is a purer interpretation of Islam.
Militants inside Indonesia have often targeted churches, Buddhist temples, Western embassies, businesses and tourists — the very symbols of the country’s openness and plurality. Thursday’s attack was the first major one in Jakarta since the twin bombings of two hotels in 2009.
Bahrun served a prison sentence in West Java province in Indonesia in 2011 and 2012 for illegal possession of firearms and explosives, and he is identified as the author of a recent blog post praising the November terrorist attacks in Paris and their high death toll. The post, titled “Lessons from the Paris Attacks”, urged his fellow Indonesians “to study the planning, targeting, timing, coordination, security and courage of the Paris teams”, according to an article by Ms Jones, the terrorism expert.
In April 2015, Katibah Nusantara fighters captured territory held by Kurdish forces in Syria, a boon for its online drive to recruit new fighters and supporters among Malay speakers in Southeast Asia, according to research paper published last year by the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
“The growing reach of Katibah Nusantara could lead to its expanding influence in Islamic State’s decision-making process, in turn leading IS to giving greater priority to Southeast Asia as its war zone,” the researchers said.
The militants initially targeted the police traffic post on Jalan Thamrin, one of Jakarta’s main thoroughfares. Video showed a series of blasts in a parking lot across the street from the post, just yards from the front doors of a Starbucks coffee shop and a Burger King restaurant. Video aired on local television appeared to show two of the attackers blowing themselves up near the Starbucks.
At least one assailant fired at the police post. Security forces stormed the area, and the police later said they had arrested four suspects. An Indonesian television station reported early yesterday that the police had arrested three more people suspected of being connected with the attack.
The two civilians killed in the attack were a Canadian and an Indonesian, President Joko Widodo’s Cabinet secretary, Pramono Anung, said at a news conference.
Canada’s foreign affairs ministry did not immediately confirm whether a Canadian citizen had died.
A Dutch man, an expert in forestry and ecosystems management for the United Nations, was seriously wounded and was in an intensive care unit after surgery, a United Nations official in Jakarta said. The UN declined to identify the man, but said he was “fighting for his life”.
The police department’s public relations division said in a post on its official Facebook page that 23 people had been treated for injuries, including five police officers, four foreigners and 14 other civilians.
Thursday’s attack took place just yards from Plaza Sarinah, a shopping mall that was one of the few landmarks US President Barack Obama recognised on a 2010 state visit, as his motorcade rolled through Jakarta, where he lived as a child.
Numerous high-rise buildings, including offices occupied by the UN, lie within yards of the police post, as well as several four- and five-star hotels and Tanah Abang, Southeast Asia’s largest traditional textiles market. The US embassy is a little over half a mile from the attack site, which is also near Indonesia’s National Monument and the presidential palace complex.
Indonesia’s violent Islamists are made up of at least three overlapping pro-IS groups, including Ansharut Daulah Islamiyah, a sort of umbrella group that claims to be the main IS structure in Indonesia; Mujahidin of Eastern Indonesia, based in Poso, on the island of Sulawesi, whose commander, Santoso, leads a band of about 30 armed men including several ethnic Uighurs; and a group based in central Java that is believed to take instructions directly from an Indonesian fighter for the IS in Syria.
The country is also home to Jemaah Islamiyah, a group that has been blamed for a number of deadly attacks in Indonesia, according to Ms Jones. It supports the Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front, and not the Islamic State.
Though the group is rebuilding, it does not appear for the moment to be interested in violence in Indonesia, she said.
The most severe attacks by Islamic militants occurred on Bali in 2002 and again in 2005, when 25 people were killed.
In 2003, an attack in Jakarta left 12 people dead. The hotel was struck again in 2009, nearly simultaneously with the RitzCarlton hotel in Jakarta, and eight people were killed.
Yohanes Sulaiman, a political analyst, said Indonesia’s government had not done enough to contain Islamist radicals in recent years.
He said the police had “done a good job in preventing such attacks, considering that Indonesia is kind of a messy place. What the government hasn’t been doing is to stop the radicalism.”
Indonesian extremists are known to have trained and fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s, in the southern Philippines, possibly in Bosnia and now in Syria.