Jakarta Attack May Signal Revival of Bloody Campaign in Indonesia

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/15/world/asia/indonesia-islamic-state.html

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BANGKOK — Hundreds of Indonesians have traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State over the past two years, and more than 50 have been killed there, according to the Indonesian government.

But in recent months, Indonesian jihadists appear to have increasingly sought targets at home. Now, security analysts say that the violence in the capital, Jakarta, on Thursday may portend a revival of an intermittent but bloody campaign, often against symbols of the West, that has plagued Indonesia for the past decade and a half.

“In the last six months, we’ve seen a spike of planning for violence in Indonesia,” said Sidney Jones, an expert on terrorism in the country and the director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Jakarta.

“None of it is a reaction to domestic politics,” Ms. Jones said.

“It’s a desire to prove that jihadi groups are still alive and well in Indonesia and are committed to carrying out the ISIS agenda,” she said, referring to the Islamic State.

Over the past two months, the Indonesian police have arrested more than a dozen people suspected of being militants, three of whom were accused of involvement in a small explosion on New Year’s Eve in Bandung, a city on the island of Java.

With more than 250 million people, Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, but it also has a tradition of tolerance toward other religions. Only a tiny fraction of the population is radicalized, analysts say, but in recent years, the country has grappled with rising tensions between moderates and hard-line groups, some of them peaceful and others militant, promoting a purer interpretation of Islam.

Indonesia’s violent Islamists are made up of at least three overlapping pro-Islamic State groups, including Ansharut Daulah Islamiyah, a sort of umbrella group that claims to be the main Islamic State structure in Indonesia; Mujahidin of Eastern Indonesia, based in Poso, on the island of Sulawesi, whose commander, Santoso, leads a band of about 30 armed men including several ethnic Uighurs; and a group based in central Java that is believed to take instructions directly from an Indonesian fighter for the Islamic State in Syria.

The country is also home to the newly rebuilt Jemaah Islamiyah, a group that has been blamed for a number of deadly attacks in Indonesia but that is against the Islamic State and supports the Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front. It does not appear for the moment to be interested in violence in Indonesia.

Assaults against Western targets, churches and nonmainstream Islamic groups have preoccupied Indonesian security agencies for the past 15 years.

The most severe were bombings in 2002 on the resort island of Bali that killed more than 200 people, a majority of them foreigners. Tourist areas in Bali were targeted again in 2005, and 25 people were killed.

In 2003, an attack on the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta left 12 people dead.

The JW Marriott was struck again in 2009, nearly simultaneously with the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Jakarta, and eight people were killed.

Navhat Nuraniyah, another analyst at the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, has estimated that about 2,000 people have joined rallies in Indonesia in support of the Islamic State or have pledged allegiance to the group.

Some were “keyboard warriors rather than experienced combatants,” she wrote in an article published in the fall in Inside Indonesia, an online magazine.

The target of the assault on Thursday in one of the busiest parts of Jakarta, which includes the regional offices of the United Nations, shopping malls and five-star hotels, remained unclear. One of the sites attacked was a Starbucks.

“If it turns out Starbucks was deliberately targeted, rather than just the nearby police post, that would be the first attack on a Western icon since the hotel bombings in 2009,” Ms. Jones said.