On the heels of Tuesday’s suicide attack near the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and another suicide attack yesterday on the Pakistani consulate in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, ISIS has claimed responsibility for a sprawling attack today on a shopping mall in Jakarta, Indonesia. Today’s attack seems to have been an attempt to recreate ISIS’s November attack in Paris, involving a series of bombings and several gunmen, yet remarkably the death toll so far is reportedly at seven, and five of those are the attackers themselves. That number may rise as more is learned, but at least by initial accounts it seems like this could have been a far deadlier event than it actually was.
Indonesia is no stranger to terrorist attacks, although this seems like it may be the highest-profile attack (owing in large part to the infamy of the perpetrators) the country has seen in years. The deadliest incident in the country’s history was the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing, perpetrated by Jemaah Islamiyah, which has ties to al-Qaeda but has been more active in the Philippines in recent years than in Indonesia. That attack was ostensibly intended to strike Australian tourists, in response to Australia’s support for the East Timorese independence movement. This attack doesn’t seem to have had such a specific political rationale behind it. This is ISIS’s first attack in Indonesia, though it has had a “presence” in southeast Asia since the Philippine Islamist group Abu Sayyaf pledged its loyalty to ISIS in July 2014. As with Nigeria’s Boko Haram, there’s not much evidence that this pledge has led to any coordination between main ISIS and Abu Sayyaf, but today’s attack presumably shows that ISIS is now making a bigger move into southeast Asia.
Indonesia is home to over 200,000,000 Muslims, making it the largest Muslim majority nation on earth as well as the country with the single largest Muslim population (FUN FACT: India is third, with about 178,000,000 Muslims, even though Muslims only account for around 15% of the Indian population). So you can see why a group like ISIS would be keenly interested in establishing a foothold there. Last month, Indonesian security forces on the island of Sulawesi began searching in earnest for a militant leader named Santoso, who’s been one of the top terrorist figures in Indonesia for a few years now but recently publicly pledged allegiance to ISIS, but they failed to find him. Santoro may have with him a couple of hundred ISIS veterans who have returned to Indonesia from the Syria-Iraq theater, and the number of Indonesians who are thought to have pledged loyalty to ISIS is thought to be upwards of 1000–admittedly an inexact figure, and not that many in a country of ~250 million people, but enough to be of concern.
Since Santoro’s declaration of support for ISIS, concern over ISIS’s intentions in Indonesia has grown, and today’s attack probably didn’t come as a huge surprise to the Indonesian security establishment. In late December, the Indonesian government arrested a number of people suspected of planning a terrorist plot to assassinate public figures and attack Shiʿa Muslims (ISIS’s stock in trade), and warned that despite the arrests the threat of an attack was still very high. And people outside of Indonesia have been sounding similar warnings. Australian Attorney General George Brandis said last month that he has “no doubt at all” that ISIS wants to establish itself in Indonesia. Just this week, a terrorism expert named Rohan Gunaratna at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore wrote in Singapore’s The Straits Times that “ISIS is determined to declare at least one province in Asia in 2016,” though he argued that the Philippines was a likelier spot for that declaration than Indonesia.
However, Indonesia has lagged far behind many other countries (including many European countries) in terms of the number of foreign ISIS recruits it has produced. The factors that tend to produce large numbers of ISIS recruits–instability, political repression, deep Wahhabi roots–simply don’t exist in Indonesia. This suggests that despite attacks like today’s, ISIS is going to have an upward climb to make any real headway in Indonesia. It can capitalize on the presence of Santoro and his fighters, but it seems like the pump hasn’t been primed for ISIS in Indonesia to the extent that it was in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.
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