Da’ish a Threat to Security: Jakarta

The Australian

24 March 2015

“I think it is dangerous, but we have not yet come to that stage,” he said yesterday when asked if Indonesia was facing an Islamic State terrorism emergency.

“We have to fight them from all aspects, ideology, strategic and religion,” Mr Kalla said after opening an international conference in Jakarta on the country’s responses to the threat.

Security agencies also were preparing a report listing Islamic State-promoting radical websites preparatory to banning them, co-ordinating minister Tedjo Edhy Purdijanto said.

The Indonesian government, until now slow to act decisively against Islamic State recruitment, particularly through websites, and suspect travel to Turkey and Syria, has come under strong pressure from the counter-terrorism agency BNPT and current and recently retired senior policemen to strengthen legal frameworks against international terrorist penetration.

…Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert, told the conference Indonesia was hosting 200 radical Islamist websites which needed to be dismantled and the groups operating them proscribed.

“There are 22 groups currently supporting ISIS in Southeast Asia and many of those groups are based in Indonesia,” he said.

Mr Gunaratna, who heads Nanyang University’s International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, claimed the veteran Islamic terrorism promoter Abu Bakar Bashir aimed to co-ordinate those groups in fighting the Indonesian state and other governments in the region.

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