Arrests Point To New Face Of Terrorism

Source: Jakarta globe

Farouk Arnaz, Ronna Nirmala & Camelia Pasandaran | April 23, 2011

Members of the Indonesian police bomb-disposal unit recovering a parcel bomb near a church in Serpong on the outskirts of Jakarta on Thursday. The bomb was placed in an empty plot near an underground gas pipe. AFP Photo

 

The arrest of 19 terrorism suspects and the subsequent discovery of a Good Friday bomb plot appears to have revealed a new breed of terror.

Most of the newly arrested were university graduates and were apprehended in various parts of the country in relation to the series of book bombs sent to various prominent figures in Jakarta last month.

Their arrest on Thursday also led police to five bombs meant to blow up a Catholic church and an Army weapons warehouse in Serpong, Tangerang, on Friday.

But antiterrorism sources say they have yet to find any real link between these men and known terrorism or Islamist groups.

“The face of terror is changing now,” one police source said, pointing out similarities between this group and other “lone wolves” who planned and carried out attacks without the support or backing of major networks.

They included the 2006 bombing of an A&W restaurant in East Jakarta, a bicycle bomb explosion in Bekasi in September and the suicide bombing of a Cirebon mosque last week.

“These are individuals influenced by radical clerics from the Internet,” the police source said. “This is the face of the terror network we are facing today and it is the most dangerous.”

An International Crisis Group report released on Wednesday said that “violent extremism in Indonesia is increasingly taking the form of small groups acting independently of large jihadi organizations but sometimes with their encouragement.”

It underlined the change in tactics and targets, opting now for secret assassinations and increasingly local targets.

Noor Huda Ismail, a terrorism analyst, said these lone terrorists were inspired by the arrest or death of their seniors, leaders of large terror groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah.

“Because their leaders were being arrested by police, these individual terrorists conclude that their new enemy is the police or security forces, that’s why many of their attacks were addressed to the National Police.”

Noor said these individual terrorists might be harder to uncover and eradicate.

However, ICG’s Sidney Jones warned against drawing conclusions too soon and refused to rule out the possibility that a link to a larger, possibly mainstream group may later be uncovered.

Ansyaad Mbai, head of Indonesia’s National Counter-Terrorism Agency, has said that after looking at the 19 arrestees, “all the suspects in those cases are somehow related to mainstream figures or groups.”

Ansyaad cited the Indonesian Islamic State (NII) movement, the JI, Jamaah Ansharut Tauhid and other radical groups.

“There are two types of radical groups, the terrorist and non-terrorist,” he said.

“They seems to be separate cases, but at one level such as in Aceh, they’re united and all the groups meet there,” he added. They are inspired by the mainstream group.”