Last week’s attack on Jakarta showed for the first time that Islamic State (IS) violence has arrived in Indonesia, but security experts believe the radical group’s footprint is still light there, because militants are jostling to be its regional leader.
Police have identified Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian based in Syria, as the mastermind of the blitz of bombings and gunfire that left all five attackers and two civilians dead on Thursday.
However, perhaps the region’s most influential militant is a jailed cleric, Aman Abdurrahman, who with just a few couriers and cell phones is able to command about 200 followers from behind bars.
He sits at the head of Jamaah Ansharut Daulah, an umbrella organization formed last year through an alliance of splinter groups that security experts believe could become the unifying force for IS supporters.
“They want to internalize the conflicts in Indonesia so they can bring more people from the outside,” said Rakyan Adibrata, a Jakarta-based terrorism expert who advises parliament, referring to the militants who have joined forces under one banner. “Just like Syria, you need to create a conflict zone very big that can be a magnet for all militants to come across the world to Indonesia to wage war. That’s their main objective.”
Police believe that Naim, himself an Abdurrahman supporter, was trying to prove his leadership skills to IS leaders in Syria by plotting the Jakarta attack.
“In order to get the credit from ISIS, he needs to prove his leadership capabilities,” Jakarta police chief Tito Karnavian said, using a common acronym for the Syria-based group.
He said Naim’s vision was to unite the now-splintered groups across Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, that support the IS.
The IS, which controls tracts of Syria and Iraq, has accepted allegiances from militants in Nigeria, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, but has yet to formally recognize any radical groups in Southeast Asia.
Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) was the last transnational group to successfully launch major attacks in the region, including the 2002 bombings on the resort island of Bali that killed 202 people.
JI, founded by Indonesian and Malaysian militants who returned from battling the Soviet Union in the Afghan war of the 1980s and early 1990s, has largely become defunct due to internal rivalries and a sustained crackdown by security forces.
Governments in the region fear that Malay-speaking militants returning from fighting for the IS in Syria and Iraq could form a JI-like regional organization.
However, security experts doubt there is much chance of a pan-regional group emerging that would bring militants from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines under one banner, because there is too much that divides them.
“At this point, it’s hard to imagine any Southeast Asia affiliate would be formed,” a senior Philippines army counter-terrorism official said, adding that militants in his country are mostly interested in raising money from kidnappings.
“And one big obstacle to clear now is finding an emir that all of them can agree on,” added the official, who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.
In Malaysia, former university lecturer Mahmud Ahmad is believed to be behind recent attempts to unite militant groups from three Southeast Asian countries, including the Abu Sayyaf group based in southern islands of the Philippines.
Abdurrahman remains perhaps the weightiest contender for leadership of the IS in the region.
While serving a nine-year prison term for aiding a militant training camp in Indonesia, he has managed to encourage hundreds of Indonesians to join the fight in Syria and Iraq.
“They can run the organization from the inside,” terrorism expert Adibrata said. “Couriers bring cell phones and they record every word Abdurrahman says.”
Prison authorities have tried repeatedly to silence Abdurrahman.
According to the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, 10 phones were confiscated from his cell in September 2014, but just a month later he got hold of a new phone and his sermons to followers inside and outside the prison resumed.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing