Isis claims responsibility for Jakarta gun and bomb attacks Analysis Jakarta: jihadi manuals and intelligence tip-offs pointed to rising terror threat Jakarta attacks: Islamic State militants claim responsibility – as it happened
Up to seven blasts and multiple gunfights hit the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Thursday in an apparently coordinated attack claimed by the terror group Islamic State.
The attacks left seven people dead – a police officer, a Canadian man, and five of the attackers. Seventeen people were wounded, including a critically injured Dutch man who had been working for the UN’s environment programme.
It took security forces about three hours to end the siege near a Starbucks cafe and Sarinah’s, Jakarta’s oldest department store, after a team of aabout seven militants traded gunfire with police and blew themselves up.
After the initial shoot-out two attackers appeared from behind a crowd. One of them then produced a hand-gun and shot one officer, while his accomplice fired on another. Soon after both gunmen were themselves shot dead. Two more attackers died after blowing themselves up in the parking lot in front of Starbucks. Bodies – of hostages and of terrorists – lay in the street.
Indonesian police said the attackers had taken inspiration from November’s atrocity in Paris, which left 130 dead. But the terror cell that struck Jakarta appeared to lack military training and inflicted comparatively little carnage.
The Jakarta police chief, Tito Karnavian, said an Indonesian national, Bahrun Naim, who is believed to be in Syria, was “planning this for a while. He is behind this attack.”
The Isis-linked Aamaaq news agency earlier said on its Telegram channel that the group had carried out the attack targeting “foreigners and the security forces tasked with protecting them in the Indonesian capital”. The Isis claim, posted to Twitter accounts, said “soldiers of the caliphate in Indonesia” had carried out the attack.
The local Metro TV said as many as 14 gunmen in total were involved in the attack, which started at about 10.30am local time (2.30am GMT). Police declared the attack over shortly after 3pm (8am GMT).
Jakarta bombings: I felt the blasts shake the building, says witness Risky Julianti, 25, a sales promoter at the Sarinah Mall, had just arrived at work and was changing into her uniform when the first explosion went off. She said she heard at least five more blasts and saw three people dead. “The building was shaking heavily when the blast happened. An office boy shouted ‘bomb, bomb’ and we quickly ran out to a church nearby,” she told the Guardian.
“I was very panicked and I was crying. We heard the blasts as we were running to the church.”
An unidentified man with a gun walks in the street as people run in the background on Thamrin Street near the Sarinah shopping mall in Jakarta Photograph: Veri Sanovri/AP
A UN regional representative, Jeremy Douglas, said he was getting out of his car by the UN office when a “massive bomb” detonated.
“Chaos & we’re going into lock-down,” he said on Twitter. “Apparent suicide bomber literally 100m from the office and my hotel. Now gunfire,” he adding, saying that he heard six explosions and an ensuing gunfight between police and the attackers. Edward Rees, a UN worker based in Pakistan who was visiting Jakarta, told the Guardian his colleagues in the Jakarta office heard the explosion. “They are holed up in the office awaiting instructions on what to do next.”
Helicopters circled above andarmouredvehicles entered the area, an upscale neighbourhood where there are luxury hotels and embassies that was cordoned off by the police.
“We have previously received a threat from Islamic State that Indonesia will be the spotlight,” police spokesman Anton Charliyan told journalists.
Jakarta terrorists will not defeat us, says Indonesian president Indonesian president Joko Widodo said in a statement on national TV that the situation was under control and called on people to remain calm. “The state, nation and people should not be afraid of, and lose to, such terror acts,” he said. It is estimated that 500 to 700 Indonesians have joined the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria and the government has expressed concern their return home could spark attacks. Separatist groups also operate in the country. Karnavian, the police chief, said those responsible were all Indonesian men from from West Java, Central Java, Sulawesi, and the greater Jakarta area.
Yohanes Sulaiman, a lecturer and political analyst at Universitas Jendral Achmad Yani, said Indonesian police might have missed the plot “because this is a new cell, probably radicalised young men and then exposed to Isis propaganda.”
He speculated that the attackers came from a newly created organisation as the assault was “amateurish because their target is unclear, and if reports are right, they are supposed to get in the mall, but stopped, asked to go to the police post, then opened fire”.
Police chase suspects after a series of blasts hit the Indonesia capital Jakarta. Photograph: Azqa/Jefta/Barcroft Media Indonesia suffered its deadliest attack in 2002, when 202 people were killed in three bomb attacks in the tourist hotspot Bali. Several members of Jemaah Islamiyeh, a violent Islamist militia, were convicted.
Major bomb attacks by extremist groups followed until 2009 when a crackdown weakened their operations. The emergence of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq has raised concerns that the networks will be reinforced.
Authorities have increasingly raise alerts after multiple bomb threats last year.
Police said they foiled a major plot with the arrest of several men allegedly linked to planned suicide bombings in the capital during New Year’s Eve celebrations. Raids across a number of cities led to the seizure of bomb making materials and a flag similar to the Islamic State emblem.
Up to 150,000 police and soldiers were deployed across the country on the last day of the year.
As the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, Indonesian religious and civil society organisations have stepped up campaigns to fight the spread of violent extremism.
Neighbouring Malaysia and the Philippines have also focused resources on battling Islamic State, which hopes to spread its influence through partnering with domestic militias abroad.
Jakarta attack the latest step in Islamic State's global expansion plans
Isis responds to recent setbacks in Syria and Iraq by unleashing an international campaign of almost daily terrorist raids
An Indonesian soldier on guard in an armoured vehicle after a bomb blast in front of a shopping mall in Jakarta on Thursday. Photograph: Adi Weda/EPA
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.
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.
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