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Tackling networks, skills of terrorists
Indonesia still has the potential to produce salafi jihadists at the global level and become the battlefield of the global violent movements known as salafism, jihadism or takfirism.
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Members of the police guard the vicinity during the raid of conducted by a team of the National Police's anti-terror squad Densus 88 in a shophouse in Cemani, Sukoharjo in Central Java on Monday, May 29, 2016. (Antara/Mohammad Ayudha)
T
here are 109 definitions of terrorism in the policy and academic world, including 22 key elements to describe terrorism. At the very least, terrorism can be defined as a criminal and armed violent tactic used to send messages and achieve political goals by targeting civilians.
In a nutshell, terrorism is also the threat and use of both psychological and physical force in violation of international law, by state and sub-state agencies for strategic and political goals.
Thus terrorism can be categorized into non-state actor terrorism, state actor terrorism (e.g., terror from above/governments against citizens in the communist and fascist era), and state-sponsored terrorism (e.g., the use of terror tactics perpetrated by one’s government in foreign nations to achieve certain political and national security goals).
The non-state actor with global energy currently confronting Indonesia is widely known as Salafi jihadism, which promotes the use of lesser/physical jihad to achieve their ideological and political goals, to establish sharia law and the Indonesian Islamist Salafi state.
However, a distinction must be made between the religion of Islam and a set of often-conflicting political ideologies known as Islamism, including some forms that are non-radical, reformist or gradualist.
That is why Islamist extremists who advocate acts of terrorism may be properly termed Islamist terrorists, who seek to justify and clothe their acts in the trappings of the Islam.
They are radical in terms of their perseverance to make very fundamental socio-political changes in society through nongradual means. They are extreme in their interpretation of selective Islamic texts to justify their own violent ideology and behavior.
