ISIL GROWING IN INDONESIA?
Attack funded by group, police say
An audacious attack by suicide bombers in the heart of Indonesia’s capital was funded by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, police said Friday, as they seized an ISIL flag from the home of one of the attackers and carried out raids across the country in which one suspected militant was killed.
National police chief Gen. Badrodin Haiti told reporters that Thursday’s attack was funded by ISIL through Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian who spent one year in jail for illegal possession of weapons in 2011, and is now in Syria fighting for the group.
The ISIL link, if proved, poses a challenge to Indonesian security forces. Until now, the group was known only to have sympathizers with no active cells capable of planning and carrying out a plot such as Thursday’s in which five men attacked a Starbucks café and a traffic police booth with handmade bombs, guns and suicide belts. They killed two people, one a Canadian and the other an Indonesian, and injured 20 in the first major attack in Indonesia since 2009. The militants were killed, either by their suicide vests or by police.
The attack “was funded by ISIS in Syria through Bahrun Naim,” Haiti told reporters, using an acronym for the Islamic State group.
He identified one of the attackers as Afif Sunakim, who in 2010 was jailed for his involvement in military-style training in Aceh, but was released early.
Police conducted raids across Indonesia but it was unclear whether those arrested were suspected of links to the bombing. They also outlined a partial reconstruction of events based on security camera video, part of which showed a Starbucks customer escaping from the grip of a bomber before he detonated his suicide bomb. Police said the customer suffered minor injuries.
In recent years, Indonesian counterterrorism forces successfully stamped out the extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah behind several attacks, including the 2002 bombings of bars in Bali which killed 202 people, as well as two hotel bombings in Jakarta in 2009 that killed seven people.