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Indonesia, Australia team up to track extremist returnees
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Ever closer links: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, left, confers with her Indonesian counterpart Retno Marsudi after their meeting with Indonesian President Joko Widodo at Merdeka Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
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ndonesia and Australia have agreed to strengthen cooperation and information-sharing to improve the tracking of returnees who fly back home after joining the Islamic State (IS) militant group in Syria and Iraq.
Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said at least 110 Australians and up to 500 Indonesians were still in the Middle East with IS. If they all survived the severe military strikes and the conflict there, they were likely to return to their home countries and therefore raise the level of the terrorism threat.
"It needs more efforts from international countries to monitor [the returnees’] movements and thus it is important for Indonesia and Australia to step up information-sharing, so that we all know where they are and what they are up to," Bishop told journalists on Wednesday.
More comprehensive cooperation was important as the returnees presented a more dangerous threat since they had networks, experience and abilities that had the potential to be used in spreading radicalism as well as orchestrating terror attacks in their home countries, Bishop said.
Australia had experienced the flow of returning Australian terrorist fighters from Afghanistan before, and following their returns, the extremists had turned into hardline terrorists and committed terror attacks associated with the Afghan jihadi groups they previously supported, Bishop said.
Meanwhile, Coordinating Political, Legal, and Security Affairs Minister Wiranto said stronger cooperation with Australia was also expected to involve technology transfers, particularly in the intelligence sector. (dmr)
