Jakarta attacks highlight ISIS’s growing global reach

The suicide bombing and gun attacks in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, on 13 January have been described as the latest step in ISIS’s growing global plans. The attacks began during late morning with bomb blasts near a Starbucks and police security post in the vicinity of government buildings and foreign missions. The attackers subsequently fled to the Djakarta Theatre, where a standoff developed with the police. Two of the attackers were killed detonating a suicide bomb, and three more in gunfire with the police. A Canadian and Indonesian national were also killed, along with several police officers. The attack mirrored those that have occurred elsewhere in recent months, notably the French capital, Paris. They are officially described as a  ‘Marauding Terrorist Firearms Attack’ (MTFA), reflecting the style in which they are executed. Indonesian police had reportedly received warnings in November 2015 that an attack was being planned, and the country has been on high alert. Observers had said it was only a matter of time before it was targeted. ISIS subsequently claimed responsibility for the attack, which Indonesian police believe was masterminded by Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian national who is thought to be in Syria. As with previous, similar attacks, the focus was on targeting civilians and Western interests, reflecting ISIS’s wider ideological aims. 

The mayhem in Jakarta, following hard on the heels of this week’s shootings and bombings in Turkey, Iraq and Cameroon, is further confirmation that Islamic State is now pursuing an expanded, go-anywhere international campaign of almost daily terror attacks with the overall aim of taking the fight to the “enemy”.

The strategic shift follows intensifying western military pressure on areas of Iraq and Syria that Isis claims as its homeland. These territories are the foundation of the supposedly all-powerful caliphate declared by Isis’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, from the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul on 5 July 2014.

Aerial assaults by the American-led coalition on Isis’s Raqqa headquarters in Syria and other strongholds have taken their toll. Last autumn, Russia and Britain joined in. On the ground, Isis has been pushed back by the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga, losing the key Iraqi city of Ramadi last month.

Responding to these setbacks, Baghdadi appears to have decided that the best form of defence is offence. And he has chosen as targets the hard-to-protect civilian heartlands of his tormentors and their pro-western allies. Last November’s atrocities in Paris showed just how much damage a few fanatical jihadists can do, and how much fear such terrifying events can generate.

Officials said Thursday’s Jakarta rampage closely aped Paris. Following Isis’s methodology, and indirectly guided by Baghdadi, Isis backers and sympathisers from other extremist Indonesian groups seem to have conspired to hit civilians and western targets such as a Starbucks cafe and the police – symbols of state authority.

Sidney Jones, of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, noted the Paris attacks drew praise from some of the estimated 500-700 Indonesians fighting for Isis in Syria. Bahrun Naim, an ex-prisoner and jihadi intellectual, posted a blog titled Lessons from the Paris Attacks (Pelajaran dari Serangan Prancis). He urged would-be jihadis in Indonesia to study the planning, targeting, timing, coordination, security and courage of the Paris teams, she said.

Until recently, at least, there was no known Isis structure in Indonesia. But Jones predicted in November that rivalry between two Syria-based Indonesian Isis commanders, Bahrum Syah and Abu Jandal, could bring a Paris-style attack to Jakarta. As in Europe, jihadis returning from the Middle East may also be implicated in Thursday’s events.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, appears to have decided that the best form of defence is offence. Photograph: AFP/Getty

Wherever it is waged, Isis’s international terror campaign is designed to advance defined ideological aims. These include convincing Sunni Muslims of the primacy and lasting power of Baghdadi’s caliphate; inspiring fear and respect among the kuffar (non-believers); and promoting Isis’s seventh-century ideas of hierarchy, sharia law, and personal and societal purification, based on the teachings of the “pious forefathers” (the Salafis).

Without Isis’s physical elimination, there seems scant prospect of an end to its terror campaign. As The Atlantic commentator Graeme Wood has noted, Isis does not want or seek peace with its enemies. There will no truce or ceasefire. Isis sees itself as a harbinger of the end of times. Before the apocalypse arrives, it is pledged to destroying all 200 million Shia Muslims, whom it regards as heretics, all other Muslims who by accepting secular governance confirm their apostasy, and the “army of Rome” (the west).

Isis in Syria and Iraq continues to rely on foreign recruits to boost its numbers. But the perpetuation of its global terror campaign depends on attracting affiliates and sympathisers across the Muslim world and beyond, partly by example and partly through social media and the internet.

Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, blamed for this week’s suicide bombing at a Cameroon mosque, is typical of groups that began as independent gangs and later allied with Isis. Some members of Indonesia’s most infamous group, Jemaah Islamiyah, an al-Qaida affiliate responsible for the 2002 Bali bombing, are also suspected of defecting to Isis.

Among Indonesia’s neighbours, the Abu Sayyaf group, blamed for many of the Philippines’ deadliest bombings, and the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters in Mindanao, have lately pledged allegiance to Isis. Majority-Muslim Malaysia is also on alert for Isis imitators.

As Isis’s international notoriety grows, so too may its unifying appeal to the fanatics and fundamentalists, the disaffected and the dispossessed, and the merely criminal of the Sunni Muslim world. Its overriding ambition is plain: to be the first terrorist organisation with truly global reach.