Family photo new portrait of militancy
Indonesian parents, kids bombed three churches
JAKARTA, Indonesia — In the photo, the mother rests one hand on her youngest son’s arm. Two little sisters in the front hold flowers against matching red headscarves. Dad stands in the back next to the oldest son who has already outgrown him. The six are dressed in happy prints and colors — a purple batik shirt, a pink flowered dress — and Mom’s flowing headscarf is the color of sky.
It appears to be a picture of a happy middle-class Indonesian family. But it has shocked the world’s most populous Muslim nation this week by becoming its new face of militant violence.
Friends and neighbors describe the Muslim parents as normal and nice, associating regularly with Christians who lived nearby and letting their home-schooled children play with others in the neighborhood.
But on Sunday, they fanned out with suicide bombs attached to themselves and their children, attacking three churches. The entire family was killed in Indonesia’s second-largest city of Surabaya. At least 13 people died in the churches and more than 40 others were injured. The youngest human bomb, the little girl staring directly at the camera with big brown eyes, was just 8 years old. Her big sister was 12.
Before people had time to fully process that children had been used for the first time to carry out a suicide attack in Indonesia, it happened again. Another family — including a 7-year-old child who survived — participated in a similar suicide mission at police headquarters in the same city on Monday.
Three members of a third family also died when homemade bombs exploded in their apartment Sunday night, and three children survived.
Police said their investigation found the three families knew each other and came together on Sundays to study and recite the Quran. They indoctrinated their children in various ways at the meetings, including showing violent jihadist videos, East Java police chief Machfud Arifin said.
The father who carried out the church bombings, Dita Oepriarto, headed the Surabaya cell of Jemaah Anshorut Daulah, an Indonesian network of extremist groups affiliated with the Islamic State group, police said.