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Police warned of rise of ‘not well-trained terrorists’
The decline of Jamaah Anshar Daulah, a home-grown radical group blamed for a spate of terrorist attacks in recent years, has been attributed to the arrests of top leaders and the loss of military-style training camps .
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On alert: East Java Police chief Insp. Gen. Machfud Arifin (center) inspects evidence siezed from several terrorism suspects during a press conference in Tuban, East Java, on April 8. The police chief said six suspected terrorists were killed in a shootout against the National Police's Densus 88 counterterrorism squad. (Antara/Aguk Sudarmojo)
T
he decline of Jamaah Anshar Daulah (JAD), a home-grown radical group blamed for a spate of terrorist attacks in recent years, has been attributed to the arrests of top leaders and the loss of military-style training camps .
In the latest blow, the group known as a major supplier of fighters to the Islamic State (IS) movement apparently lost six of its fighters in a shoot-out with personnel of the National Police’s Densus 88 counterterrorism squad in Tuban, East Java, on Sunday.
“The way they missed their targets in Sunday’s exchange of fire showed they did not undergo any military training,” National Police spokesperson Insp. Gen. Boy Rafli Amar said in a media briefing in Jakarta on Monday. He showed the pictures of six locally made revolvers found on the dead attackers.
“They [the JAD cells] are not strong enough, but they are still disturbing.”
Police noted that terrorist groups lost their last training camp in Poso, Central Sulawesi, following the death of Santoso, the leader of the East Indonesia Mujahidin terrorist group in July last year.
The police’s claims were confirmed by terrorism and radicalism researcher Rakyan Adibrata.
“It is true that the quality of an attack is in line with the length of military training a combatant has undergone. However, it does not mean that a terrorist attack must be carried out by a well-trained person,” he said.
Rakyan said terrorist attacks that occurred over the last two years in various places across Indonesia showed that the perpetrators did not have skills typically obtained from military training.
He said he considered several terrorist attacks, such as a bomb attack on Jl. Thamrin in Jakarta in January 2016, the stabbing of a police officer in Tangerang in October 2016 and the recent use of a pressure cooker bomb in an attempted attack in Bandung, West Java, to be “reckless and amateurish”.
“In the Thamrin incident, you could see from the way they reloaded and aimed their guns at their targets that they were not well trained. The attack was executed simply to show the world that they still existed,” said Rakyan.
These could not compare to the attacks launched by the first generation of JAD who spent years in military training in Afghanistan, he said.
“However, the number of terrorist attacks, which has been increasing in the last two years, indicates that radicalization is on the rise.” (hol/ebf)
