Femi Adi – Indonesia's government must adopt new strategies to target terrorist acts carried out by individuals after authorities dismantled or disrupted larger organizations, the International Crisis Group said.
The country's National Anti-Terrorism Agency should "immediately" take measures such as creating a database of schools and mosques whose attendees have been arrested for terrorism, the Brussels-based group said in a report released today. Authorities should also compile examples of communities that have rejected extremist preachings, the report said.
"A database is critical because if you look at the pattern of radicalization and recruitment, it tends to concentrate in certain areas," Sidney Jones, a senior adviser with Crisis Group in Jakarta, said by e-mail today. "One mosque in Laweyan, Solo, Central Java, for example, has been producing extremists for the last decade."
The actions are necessary as individuals without clear ties to larger groups have carried out bombings over the last two years in isolated acts of religious intolerance, the group said.
Examples include a suicide attack in a mosque in Cirebon, West Java that killed the bomber and wounded 30 people on April 15 and bombs concealed in books delivered in Jakarta in March.
"With 800,000 mosques across the country, it would be a huge waste of time and money to try and reach them all. You have to target the programs where the problem is," Jones said.
The formation of small groups acting independently of larger jihadist organizations is in part the result of the weakening of the Jemaah Islamiyah, Jama'ah Anshorut Tauhid and other groups, the report said. The October 2002 attacks on a Bali nightclub that killed 202 people including 88 Australians are blamed on Jemaah Islamiyah, an al-Qaeda linked group.