A bunch of amateurs? Indonesia's homegrown jihadis ridicule ISIS after Jakarta attack - experts fear local groups are now a growing threat with ‘foreigners’ in their sights
A bunch of amateurs?
Indonesia's homegrown jihadis ridicule ISIS after Jakarta attack - experts fear
local groups are now a growing threat with ‘foreigners’ in their sights
Four weeks after Islamic State claimed killings, veteran extremists scorn its
lack of relative success while experts fear local groups are now a growing
threat with ‘foreigners’ in their sights
As Abu Tholut sips
on his guava juice, his wispy silver beard brushing against the glass, he mulls
the state of global jihad and his not insubstantial role in it.
Three hours of mayhem,
panic and bloodshed as terror comes to Jakarta
Confusion
and chaos reign as terrorists strike and strike again, turning the heart of the
city’s business district into a battlezone
“Al-Baghdadi,” scoffs the 54-year-old
convicted terrorist, letting loose on his views of the leader of Islamic State.
“When I went to Afghanistan in ’85, he would have been just 14.
“We call him,” he says with a smirk,
“anak kemarin sore”.
The phrase in Indonesian refers
playfully but somewhat derogatorily to the new kid on the block – like a child
born just “yesterday afternoon”.
Tholut is seated with an entourage in
a small restaurant in a suburban backstreet of Bekasi, a city 30km outside
Jakarta, just months after being released from prison.
It was his second spell in jail for
terrorism offences – in 2011 he was jailed for his involvement in a militant
training camp – but he is now out on parole and is freely speaking his mind.
Isis has claimed responsibility for
the assaults near Jakarta’s Sarinah department store, the worst terrorist
attack in Indonesia since 2009.
Abu Tholut, former senior member of Jemaah Islamiyah, has been jailed twice for
terrorism offences. Photograph: Kate Lamb for the Guardian
In the world’s largest
Muslim-majority nation, home to a radical fringe of sometimes interconnected
but oscillating jihadi networks, it has raised fears about the spectre of more
to come.
Tholut – himself a former senior
member of one of those networks, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the south-east Asian
militant group behind the 2002 Bali bombings – has strong views about what
happened on 14 January.
“We can see in the video that they
seem to be thinking on the spot. They were both thinking: ‘Where should we go?
All right, you go there.’ It’s like they didn’t plan things and planned on the
spot instead. Then the police came, and they shot them. A traffic cop,” he
laughs.
The Sarinah attack was a laughable,
bungled mess, he adds.
“Why did they bring a bomb into the
parking lot, and then they just sat there? Who knows what they were doing,
tinkering with it, then one sat down, and suddenly the explosion happened!” An
animated Tholut pauses before laughing again: “What were they doing there?”
Aside from the oddity of hearing a
convicted terrorist dissect the work of rookie jihadis over Nasi Padang (a
banquet of small, spicy dishes stacked across the table), Tholut appears to
have a point.
The
Sarinah attacks were likely motivated by lethal, ideological convictions, but
overall they were clumsy. The shooters struggled to hit targets even at close
range. One attacker, seemingly by accident, killed himself as a bomb he was
preparing to throw at police exploded. In total four attackers died and four
civilians.
Many believe, though, that the lack of
relative success of the attacks will not deter others in the future.
In the years since, the police have
been the main target, in retribution for damage authorities have inflicted on
extremist networks.
But the evolution of Isis – and its
attraction to the hundreds of Indonesians who have left their country to join
it – has significantly altered the dynamics, with foreigners once again
becoming targets.
Speaking at a recent forum in
Jakarta, analyst Sidney Jones spoke of the changing nature of the targets.
“We are in, I think, for more
attempts at violence. Unfortunately, the three groups that everyone is
targeting are police, number one, and foreigners and Shia [Muslims] number two
and three” said Jones, “Foreigners for the first time since 2009 are back on
the agenda.”
In the wake of Sarinah, the government
has turned its attention to bolstering the country’s counter-terrorism laws and
thwarting planned attacks, but there are other glaring issues in the system
that many believe desperately need to be addressed.
Competition between pro-Isis figures,
flourishing extremism in Indonesian jails and the prospect of trained fighters
returning from Syria are all factors of concern in Indonesia’s extremist
landscape.
Isis
responds to recent setbacks in Syria and Iraq by unleashing an international
campaign of almost daily terrorist raids
Structurally
the fragmented nature of Isis-aligned networks here is one reason why analysts
like Jones believe there will be more attacks.
A leadership struggle has developed
between three Indonesians who have joined Isis in Syria, and it appears to be
driving a battle for control of the Indonesian and Malaysian wing of Isis,
Katibah Nusantara.
The three Indonesians in question are
Bahrumsyah – who currently heads the Malay-speaking fighting unit – Abu Jandal
and Bahrun Naim.
“The competition between these three
can have lethal consequences in Indonesia because how do you prove you are the
person most deserving of leadership and acknowledgement? It’s by organising
your followers to do something,” Jones says.
While it is believed the latest
attack was locally organised at the behest of hardline cleric Aman Abdurrahman,
the competitiveness between the three kicked in immediately after word reached
Syria.
Bahrumsyah, who was apparently
surprised by the news, ordered one of his contacts to conduct a similar assault
directly after, according to a February 2016 report by the Institute for Policy Analysis of
Conflict (Ipac). Police arrested the suspected would-be attacker
before he had the chance to follow through.
Months earlier Bahrun Naim – who has
organised a comprehensive jihadi committee on the encrypted messaging app Telegram – sent funds for attacks in Indonesia,
and has tried to engineer lone wolf attacks in Malaysia and Singapore as well.
These threats and the Jakarta attacks
have led the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, to call for the country’s
counter-terrorism strategy to be revised.
Authorities have complained of the
lack of legal framework to pursue would-be terrorists and there is a push to
bring in more stringent laws by mid-2016. While support for Isis was
criminalised in 2014, no current legislation outlaws travelling to join Isis.
At least 300 Indonesians have
continued to leave for Syria – would-be fighters, families, women and children
– but it is getting harder to get there. Last year alone 215 people were
deported back to Indonesia, and tighter border controls have been cited as one
possible explanation for the refocusing of jihadi energy at home.
One
of the biggest vulnerabilities is the Indonesian justice system itself, where
hardline sentiment has grown and flourished.
In the months leading up to the
Sarinah attack, each of the four perpetrators visited the maximum-security
prison of Nusa Kambangan to meet with pro-Isis leaders. One of the Sarinah
gunmen was released on terrorism charges last August, raising questions about
recidivism and monitoring of convicted terrorists post release.
Meanwhile, lax controls inside Nusa
Kambangan have also allowed jailed cleric Aman Abdurrahman to become a
spiritual figurehead of the pro-Isis movement from behind bars.
A fluent Arabic speaker, Abdurrahman
has translated streams of extremist doctrine into Indonesian, which is then
widely circulated on hardline websites.
Days before the Sarinah attack he issued a much-shared fatwa calling for his
followers to join Isis in Syria “and if you cannot emigrate then wage jihad
with spirit wherever you are”. The freedoms enjoyed in prison have
drawn criticism – even from senior hardliners in the Indonesian jihadi movement. One is Abu Jibril, once second in
command in JI. “It is very free, he has laptops and
cell phones. When I was arrested I wasn’t allowed any of that,” Jibril told the
Guardian, comparing his own detention in Malaysia to Abdurrahman’s. “You can translate
all the news from Syria and thus help to form public opinion about Isis in
Indonesia.” Jibril made the comments after
speaking at a hardline event at a Bekasi mosque in late January, where he and
Abu Tholut outlined their conception of an Islamic caliphate. “The forming of a caliphate in
Indonesia is inseparable from the global Islamic community,” explained Jibril
after his sermon. “The forming of a caliphate should be agreed by the Muslim
community worldwide.” While both speakers are virulently
anti-Isis, the event shows the old jihadi guard hasn’t faded into oblivion just
yet. Hundreds of men in prayer caps and
women in face veils attended the event, which was patrolled not by any visible
police presence but burly members of the Islamic group Majelis Mujahidin
Indonesia (MMI). Dressed in black vests with the words
MUJAHIDIN printed in bright yellow capital letters across the back, the MMI
members busied themselves on walkie-talkies around the mosque perimeters.
A security guard from the Majelis Mujahidin (Mujahidin Council), right, stands
outside a talk by three radical Islamic preachers near Jakarta. Photograph: Ed
Wray/Getty Images In the courtyard people posed in
front of a replica Ka’bah, the black shrine of Mecca, while inside the event
was being MC’d by a former police officer who joined the other side. That two senior ex-JI members are
given free reign to espouse their radical but non-violent views might be
unnerving, but analyst Taufik Andre, from the Institute for International Peace
Building, says the police are watching. Andre believes the authorities are
prioritising Isis while taking a soft approach to JI. “The police are trying to negotiate
with the JI elite to influence them not to carry out attacks here,” he says,
“And for that there will be no law enforcement, or action.” Yet in the long term, JI could be
more of a threat. The JI network took a series of hits after the Bali
bombings, but there are strong indications the group has been quietly
reconsolidating: recruiting members, conducting religious outreach and
producing weapons clandestinely. To what end, though, no one really
seems to know.
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