Islamic State terrorists now pose a threat – not only in Indonesia, the largest Muslim democracy in the world, but also across southeast Asia more generally and even Australia
The bomb attack on 14 January in Jakarta, which killed 7 people – modelled on the Paris attack in November 2015, but without the same impact in terms of creating fear, panic and death – demonstrated the threat that Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) now poses not only in Indonesia, the largest Muslim democracy in the world, but also to southeast Asia more generally and even Australia.
How has Isil evolved a presence in southeast Asia and can it be dismantled?
The attack on the Sarinah shopping centre in the upmarket district of Menteng last week was the first in the Indonesian capital since July 2009 when the surviving remnant of the violent wing of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), al-Qaeda’s south-east Asian franchise, bombed the Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels a few blocks away from the latest incident.
Islamic state in southeast Asia
Islamic State has now replaced JI as the source of regional violent Islamism. More importantly, Isil has inherited its regional structure, its ideology, and its strategy from JI. Significantly, Abu Bakr Bashir, the ‘emir’ of JI, currently serving a sentence for treason in Cipijang jail, pledged allegiance to Isil in 2014. Yet until last week it had seemed that the former al-Qaeda linked franchises in southeast Asia, which included not only JI, but Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and the Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia, had been decapitated and the curtain closed on this particular theatre of global salafist jihadism.
However, although the first generation leadership of JI, which had coordinated the Bali bombings in 2002, had either been eliminated or imprisoned by 2009, its ideology and its networks remained in place. It now appears that this previously dormant structure has reawakened.
Abu Bakr Bashir Photo: Reuters
The evolution of a Southeast Asian terror network
Historically, JI evolved as an al-Qaeda linked grouping in southeast Asia in the course of the 1990s. Founded by Indonesian salafists Bashir and Abu Sangkar in Johor, Malaysia, after they fled the authoritarian but nationalist Indonesian New Order regime, JI, like Isil, drew together former Mujahideen who had fought in Afghanistan from across the region.
The evolving jihadist network linked Indonesian Islamists alienated from the New Order, like Riduan Isamuddin (aka Hambali) with Malaysian salafists disillusioned with both the Malaysia’s Islamic party, Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, and the ruling United Malay Nationalist Organisation’s (UMNO) failure to impose sharia law in the multiethnic state, and with Abu Sayyaf founded by returning Moro fighters in Muslim majority southern Philippines.
After the collapse of the New Order, in 1998, JI’s core leadership returned to Solo in Central Java whence it continued both recruitment and consciousness raising activities. The Bali bomber Imam Samudra was a graduate of this programme as is the current coordinator of Islamic State in southeast Asia, Bahrun Naim. By 2000, the network had direct links to al-Qaeda and the September 2001 Trade Center bombings through Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Photo: AP
JI’s ambition like that of Isil was to coordinate the various Islamist struggles in southeast Asia into a coherent movement to create a Southeast Asian caliphate or Darul Islam Nusantara. The strategy draws essentially localised, separatist struggles in southeast Asia into an evolving, but loose network of transnational jihadism. Jemaah Islamiyah evolved as a regional network constituted through kin groups, marital alliances, cliques and radical pesantren (religious schools) between 1985 and 2000.
Isil takes over the network
Isil has evidently inherited both the structure and the salafist theo-political vision strategically conceived in terms of regional and transnational networks.
Southeast Asian recruits to Isil and returning fighters reinforce the linkages. In its Southeast Asian manifestation, we can trace this ideal, if not the strategy, back to the Darul Islam movement in Indonesia that dates from the struggle against the Dutch colonial power in the 1940s and subsequently adumbrated by the influence of Muslim Brotherhood ideologists like Sayeed Qutb.
In fact long before the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which is often seen as the first intimation of an Islamist internationale, pan-Islamist thinkers in southeast Asia ’like those in the Middle East’ conceived resistance to jahiliyya (the state of ignorance) as a single, unified global struggle that transcended local, state and regional concerns.
The story of al-Qaeda, and now Isil, is essentially how a transnational movement aligns itself with local militant groups with country-specific grievances to increase their global reach and influence. Jemaah Islamiyah – and now Isil – provide a case study of how regional groupings come to share an ideology and a strategy whilst at the same time sustaining their own distinctive character, structure and practice.
ASEAN’s ambiguity
After 9/11 and especially after Bali, Indonesian, Malaysian Singaporean and Australian governments that had previously dismissed a coordinated Islamist threat in southeast Asia took the JI and Abu Sayyaf threat seriously. In particular collaboration with Australian Federal Police and US intelligence enabled the new Indonesian counter-terrorist police, Densus 88, to kill or imprison the core leadership of JI. Elsewhere, the Malaysian and Singaporean authorities undermined JI’s structures in their respective countries.
The wreckage of the Sari nightclub following the 2002 Bali bombings
This notwithstanding, one common factor is that the countries where JI and now Isil have proliferated, all belong to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). ASEAN has consistently failed to develop a coordinated counterterror policing response to the regional protagonists of transnational Islamism. As a consequence, with the rise of Islamic State and the development of its recruitment and grooming strategies online, it is calculated that IS has recruited close to 1000 fighters from southeast Asia, many of whom have evidently returned to open a new front in the region.
Consequently, in January 2016, two Malaysian suicide bombers killed 30 people in Syria. Meanwhile, over the past year Malaysian authorities have foiled at least four attempts to bomb public buildings and kidnap politicians and Malay Chinese businessmen in a country where ethno-religious politics have become increasingly vitriolic since the 2014 election, which the UMNO ruling party won in a campaign riddled by corruption and electoral fraud. At the same time, in the southern Philippines a revived Abu Sayyaf has reopened training camps for regional jihadists and pledged allegiance to Islamic State.
Whilst Jakarta was the site of the most recent regional manifestation of global salafist jihadism, other capitals in the region are by no means immune.
Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong observed in 2015 that southeast Asia had become a ‘key recruitment centre for Islamic state’ and the terror threat was ‘no longer over there it is here’. Somewhat problematically, from Lee’s perspective, ASEAN, which Singapore, Thailand Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines jointly founded in 1967 to promote regional stability, lacks both a shared understanding of regional security and a coordinated approach to dismantling transnational terrorism. Meanwhile, Isil exploits the idea of an integrated Islamic region to promote its version of a ‘far caliphate’ in Southeast Asia.
[David Martin Jones is Visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
M.L.R. Smith is Professor of Strategic Theory in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.]
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