A counterterrorism think tank predicts that following increased efforts by the National Police to arrest or kill terror suspects, terrorist groups will join forces, seek new recruits and attempt more fatal attacks against the police.
The Institute for International Peace Building (IIPB) predicts that terror cells will orchestrate small, but frequent, attacks against local police, rather than targeting Westerners with large-scale bombings.
Institute researcher, Taufik Andrie, said that terror groups were being forced to adopt the strategy following the arrest of 84 suspects, including key bomb-making experts and financiers, in 2012.
“For the next two or three years, planning massive attacks will be too challenging. It takes only two hours to plot the murder of a police officer, but they need a month to attack a hotel,” Taufik said in a seminar on Tuesday in Jakarta.
Last year, 15 police officers were killed in what could be categorized as terror attacks in Central Java, Central Sulawesi and Papua.
A group led by long-time fugitive Santoso is seen as the most active in targeting members of the National Police.
In Poso, the group murdered two police officers in August and shot four members of the National Police Mobile Brigade (Brimob) in December.
Santoso’s group is also being held responsible for a bomb attack on a police post in Poso, an attempt against the life of Poso Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Eko Santoso.
Taufik believes that the key to the group’s success are their links with al-Qaeda Indonesia, hard-line group Jamaah Ansharut Tauhid (JAT) and minor terror cells in Makassar, Medan and Bima, West Nusa Tenggara.
Noor Huda Ismail, executive director of IIPB, suggested that the nation’s security authorities devote their energies to tracking down what he called “dot-connectors”: individuals who play key roles in liaison between terror groups.
“It is very hard to detect them. Most of them are just regular folks like farmers. We tend to focus on big names like Santoso, who has become a media celebrity, but we forget these small actors who connect the dots,” he said.
Among these dot-connectors is Imron, a farmer from Palu in Central Sulawesi who supplied weapons for the Santoso group. The Detachment 88 counterterrorism squad arrested Imron, an al-Qaeda Indonesia member, in Palu in October.
Post-conflict areas, such as Poso and Ambon, will remain terrorist hot spots. Terrorist strategists, Noor Huda said, exploited local grievances as a way to provide cognitive and emotional openings for new recruits.
Ian Chalmers, a terrorism analyst from Curtin University in Australia, said that Indonesia should not only focus on preventing the next generation of terrorists but conduct extra efforts to de-radicalize terror convicts and ex-combatants.
“A more difficult stage is happening now, which is to bring those terrorist back from involvement in terror and have them engaged socially,” he said.
Chalmers underlined the deradicalization process must be conducted jointly by the government and civil society groups.
“Deradicalization is a very long process that might take generations. It is unrealistic to expect the government to change Indonesian society because radicalization has been here since the 1940s,” he added. (yps)