The Return of Terrorism to Southeast Asia

The Moscow theatre terrorism attack highlights the risk from Islamic State extremism in our own region, writes Greg Barton.

The devastating Islamic State (IS) attack in Moscow on 22 March bought home the reality that the terrorism threat remains. The defeat of the territorial IS caliphate five years ago was accompanied by a respite from the global campaign of attacks that commenced with the declaration of the pseudo state on 29 June 2014. The news from Moscow is that the IS threat is back.

In Afghanistan, where IS Khorasan Province (ISKP) has survived and entrenched itself since 2015, IS has been responsible for more than a thousand terrorist attacks on mosques, schools and hospitals, despite meeting fierce opposition from the Americans, the Afghans, and now the Taliban.

The word Khorasan is an historic Persian term meaning ‘the East’ and denoting a region incorporating Afghanistan, Pakistan, eastern Iran, and much of central Asia including Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. That detail is important because many of ISKP's members in Afghanistan are ethnic Tajiks, the second-largest ethnic community in the country comprising over one quarter of all Afghans. It also has a significant following throughout central Asia and in diaspora communities across Russia and Europe.

IS was quick to claim the Moscow music theatre attack. The link with ISKP remains unconfirmed, although given the dominance of ISKP in Russia and that the four alleged gunmen are Tajik it looks like ISKP either executed the attack or provided vital support. In the past two years, of all the IS provinces (wilayat) it is only ISKP that focused on external attacks. In 2023, it was involved in 21 terrorist plots outside Afghanistan. In 2022, it was linked to eight, and before that only three ISKP international plots were recorded. This marks a sharp uptick in ambition and capacity.

Over the past year, European and Russian authorities have detected and disrupted multiple ISKP terror plots, including an attempted attack on synagogue in Moscow as recently as 6 March.

What does this mean for Australia and for Australia's immediate neighbourhood of Southeast Asia? Australia's geographical isolation and secure borders mean that we can expect the direct threat from IS to lag Europe. Nevertheless, the reality of a world connected via cheap air travel and ubiquitous social media means no nation is entirely an island. To the extent that the IS brand continues to rise, the insidious allure of the IS call for lone actor attacks will gain potency. When the call to lone actors to attack “where you are with what you have” first went out in September 2014 it had a devastating impact in the five years that followed, contributing to dozens of attacks by individuals and small groups around the world, including eight attacks in Australia.

In Southeast Asia, there have been around 155 IS attacks since July 2018, mostly the Philippines and Indonesia resulting in 1,244 killed and injured.  Many more plots were detected and disrupted. At the same time, more than a thousand people travelled from the region to support or fight for the IS caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

While there have been reports of foreign terrorist fighters with links to Central Asia supporting IS operations in the Philippines and Indonesia, ISKP is unlikely to have substantial links to Southeast Asia.  Instead, the threat comes directly from the local networks of the IS East Asia Province (ISEAP, also known as IS Wilayat Sharq Asia) centred on Mindanao.

One indication of what to expect came in a rare address by the Islamic State leadership on 29 March. The 41-minute audio address by IS Spokesman Abu Hudayfah al-Ansari came a decade after the declaration of the caliphate.  It would be easy to dismiss this flowery address as empty rhetoric, mere propaganda and spin, or wishful thinking at best. That would be a mistake. The address begins by saying that, although IS was “left for dead in Syria and Iraq”, it now has expanded and is growing strong – echoing the tagline of Islamic State from its caliphate days of “remaining and expanding”.  Indeed, IS does now have a vital presence across the Sahel, beginning in West Africa, continuing through Central Africa, and into East Africa.

Abu Hudayfah doubles down on the need for discipline and unity, urging followers to remain true to their oath of loyalty, and to obey official instructions. He first praises the IS provinces across Africa for their “recent victories and conquests”, and ISKP for its attacks on “Americans, Russians, and Chinese”, and on religious minorities.  He then urges the fighters in ISEAP, in the Philippines, to “unify their ranks” and to move their attacks from “the jungles” to urban areas.

ISEAP was formed in 2014 and 2015 when several large Moro Islamist militia groups, beginning with the notorious Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), swore loyalty to IS. At the time, this was seen as mere hubris and marketing.  ASG was certainly notorious for kidnapping for ransom but was dismissed as an ill-disciplined criminal outfit.  In May 2017, the siege of the city of Marawi, the largest Muslim majority city in the Philippines, located at the north-east end of Lake Lanao in Western Mindanao, came as a dramatic confirmation that the IS connection was no idle boast.  Led by the local Maute family, the city came under IS control and it took five months of hard military responses and the physical destruction of most the city's homes and offices for the Islamic State siege to be overcome.  More than 1100 lives were lost and 1.1 million people displaced.

In the wake of the IS defeat in Marawi a peace plan that saw the formation of Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) in early 2019 has resulted in many hundreds of former IS fighters surrendering themselves to the Philippines authorities. For several years, it seemed as if IS was a spent force in the Philippines. But a year out from vital regional elections in BARMM that will determine the political and social fortunes of Moro groups violence is again on the rise.

Much of the rising tide of violence in BARMM can be dismissed as political contestation, interclan rivalry and blood feuds, or Rido, but there is no escaping the fact violent extremism in the name of IS remains a resilient threat.  This was confirmed on 3 December with an IS suicide bombing of a Catholic mass held in a sports auditorium at Mindanao State University in Marawi that saw four killed and 50 injured.

Despite the long history of violence and conflict in the Southern Philippines, suicide bombings were unknown until IS, via Indonesia, introduced this tactic in a series of six suicide bombings in the Sulu archipelago in 2019 and 2020. It is significant that this escalation occurred during successful conflict resolution negotiations to establish BARMM.

The islands of Basil and Jolo and the small communities across Sulu are now free of the violence of ASG.  But in western Mindanao the BARMM capital of Cotabato and the provinces of Lanao del Sur and Lanao del Norte are once again troubled by “black groups” as the locals refer to IS and other violent extremists.

Consequently, the IS call to take the fighting from “the jungles to the cities” is not an empty threat.  In an area awash with small arms, including grenades and  tens of thousands of assault rifles, it would be all too easy to storm a shopping mall or hotel or sporting venue and execute an attack on the scale seen in Moscow. The Mindanao capital of Davao or even the National capital of Manila are not safe. The cheerful kiosk located in the carpark of Manila airport where visitors can deposit their guns, as in a cloakroom, before entering the terminal is a reminder of the ubiquitous presence of small arms.

When reflecting on the threat of a Moscow-style attack, it needs to be recognised that IS increasingly attempts audacious attacks and mostly fails. The Moscow theatre attack could easily have failed. It is only sensible to expect attempted attacks in the Philippines and to brace for the possibility of dreadful success.

It has taken more than two years since the fall of Kabul for the failure to defeat terrorist forces in Afghanistan to manifest in terrorist attacks outside the region.  But after Moscow more attacks will be attempted.  Yet Russia’s reckless war in Ukraine has undermined Russian security, leaving it distracted, over-stretched and vulnerable. Similarly, the impact of the devastating war against Hamas in Gaza has yet to result in terrorist attacks outside the Middle East but it might in time.

Not mentioned by name in the IS leadership address on the 10th anniversary of the declaration of the caliphate was Indonesia or Malaysia. Here it needs to be acknowledged that there has been considerable success both in police-led counterterrorism and in community-led programs to counter violent extremism. In Malaysia Special Branch and in Indonesia Special Detachment (Densus) 88 units have proven themselves consistently among the best police counterterrorism units in the world disrupting many dozens of plots and arresting several thousand alleged terrorists over the past two decades.

This has seen the resilient and extensive network of the al-Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) go to ground to avoid confrontation with Densus 88. Developments involving IS, regionally and globally, and perhaps the greater involvement of the Indonesian military in counterterrorism under the presidency of former special forces general Prabowo Subianto, might see JI step out of the shadows.

IS under the guise of local networks such as JAD has emerged as a deadly threat in Indonesia and at the height of the territorial caliphate more than a thousand Southeast Asians travelled to support the utopian project.  But in recent years police counterterrorism surveillance and constant pressure has forced IS groups to attempt to fly below the radar and focus on attacking police stations in lone actor attacks.

Nevertheless, as recently as March 2021 IS was able to launch a suicide bomb attack on a Catholic church in Makassar during the Easter Holy Week.  And as the May 2018 suicide bombings in Surabaya proved, even autonomous small cell/lone actor attacks can be devastating.  The danger posed by incidents like the Moscow theatre assault lies in their potential to inspire copycat attacks.

Mindanao is the region most at risk, but a military-assault style attack at a tourist resort in Cebu, Bali, or Langkawi by a small group inspired by IS but acting autonomously, and communicating with no one, remains a dreadful possibility.

Professor Greg Barton is Chair in Global Islamic Politics at Deakin University’s Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation.