Attacks in Indonesia Mark Expansion for Islamic State Coordinated assault in Jakarta raises fears of return to violence in AsiaBy Ben Otto and Tom Wright
http://www.wsj.com/articles/attacks-in-indonesia-mark-expansion-for-islamic-state-1452817636
JAKARTA, Indonesia—Attackers tied to Islamic State marked a new battlefield in the extremist group’s global expansion, terrorizing the Indonesian capital and killing two people in a suicide assault.
The coordinated gunfire-and-bomb attack, in which all five assailants also died, raised fears of a return of Islamist-inspired violence in parts of Asia that had largely subdued an earlier generation of militants.
The rise of Islamic State has drawn hundreds of Southeast Asia militants to Syria and Iraq—some 600 from Indonesia and Malaysia alone, authorities estimate. Though the numbers are small compared with Western Europe, they are bigger than the cadre of Asian militants that was forged in Afghanistan in an earlier decade.
And extremist leaders from Indonesia to the Philippines have pledged loyalty to its self-declared caliphate.
Security officials fear Islamic State’s growth is inspiring local radicals to become more violent at home to draw attention and lay claim to Islamic State leadership in the region. “There has been clamor among the ISIS community in Indonesia…to do something to show ISIS central leadership that Indonesia is important also,” said Todd Elliott, a terrorism analyst from Concord Consulting, referring to Islamic State.
The Jakarta attackers came from a group in Solo, on Indonesia’s main island of Java, that had been in contact with Islamic State in Syria, Indonesian officials said. Deputy Police Chief Budi Gunawan said communications had been detected, but didn’t elaborate.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks on its social-media accounts, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors global jihadist activity. But it wasn’t clear whether the Jakarta attackers had actual training from the group.
Indonesian police on Friday arrested three people in connection with the attacks, after a dawn raid on a house in a Jakarta suburb, a police detective said.
ENLARGE In Washington, White House officials said there was little reason to doubt Islamic State was somehow connected, but they declined to say whether there were any direct orders from its leadership in Iraq or Syria. Islamic State “continues to show an interest in establishing a presence in Southeast Asia, leveraging established terrorist groups in the region, including in Indonesia,” said a senior administration official.
The assaults—the first major terror attacks in the capital since two, near-simultaneous bombings on Western hotels in July 2009 blamed on militants linked to al Qaeda—targeted a business district that is also popular with shoppers and tourists. They began late Thursday morning as a suicide bomber detonated a device at a Starbucks, killing himself, police said. Two gunmen outside then opened fire, and a Canadian man was struck and killed, police said.
Two more suicide bombers detonated devices on the street as motorists left their cars and joined hundreds fleeing the area. An Indonesian was killed by shrapnel, police said.
Police shot and killed two other militants, leaving all five attackers dead, they said, adding that they found six small bombs after sweeping the area. Twenty people were injured, officials said.
The country had been on heightened alert for terrorism after police arrested several militants linked to Islamic State who were allegedly planning attacks during the holiday season in December.
Police said the group had indicated there would be a “concert in Indonesia,” leading authorities to deploy more than 150,000 officers to guard places of worship and other public areas. Thursday’s perpetrators were from the same group, police said.
The relatively low death toll partly reflects a lack of sophistication after years of efforts by authorities to crack down on such groups and take out bomb-makers trained by al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
“These were not the best-trained folks,” said Zachary Abuza, an expert on Southeast Asian militants at the National War College in Washington.
Authorities say fighters from Indonesia and Malaysia who have gone to Syria and Iraq formed a division called the Malay Archipelago Combat Unit. Earlier this month, Malaysian police said two young Malaysian men led suicide attacks in Syria and Iraq that killed more than 30 people.
An estimated 120 people have gone from Australia, while 23 have gone from India, according to authorities in those countries. By contrast, the European Union’s police agency Europol estimates that 4,000 to 5,000 Western Europeans have traveled to Iraq and Syria to join Islamic State and other radical jihadist groups.
Some Southeast Asian militant leaders, whose networks were all but shut down by an intensive police effort in recent years, have pledged allegiance to Islamic State in a bid to project greater power, said Mr. Abuza. In the Philippines, which has been battling Islamist insurgents for decades with the help of the U.S. military, the hard-line Abu Sayyaf faction has pledged to follow Islamic State’s self-appointed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Radical clerics in Indonesia have also sworn support.
Islamic State “is more important to Southeast Asian militants than the other way around,” Mr. Abuza said.
Indonesia is the country with the world’s largest Muslim population and one with a reputation for moderate Islam. In the 2000s, however, it was hit by multiple attacks, including the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people, mostly tourists, and a 2004 attack on the Australian embassy.
Both were claimed by a Southeast Asian terror network known as Jemaah Islamiyah. Some of its members fought in Afghanistan and its leaders claimed to represent al Qaeda in the Malay archipelago. Jemaah Islamiyah was disrupted by an Indonesian antiterrorism police unit, whose members received training from the U.S. After the 2009 hotel attacks, Indonesia’s antiterrorism force dismantled many of the networks, killing and arresting scores of militants, including a Malaysian bomb maker in a shootout at an Indonesian farmhouse in 2009.
Indonesia also jailed a local cleric, Abu Bakar Bashir, who acted as spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah. But it didn’t break the back of the militant movement entirely.
There have been sporadic attacks in outlying areas of Indonesia, a nation of over 17,000 islands. In recent years, terrorists have focused their resources on assaulting police, the force responsible for overseeing counterterrorism efforts in Indonesia.
According to the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, an Indonesian-based nonprofit group that tracks local terrorist groups, many of today’s active militants can be traced back to the same religious schools that fed Jemaah Islamiyah—only this time they have vowed their allegiance to Islamic State.
They “have emerged from existing radical networks that have never gone away,” the report said. “They may have morphed, realigned, regrouped and regenerated but they are not new.”
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