A police officer gives a hand signal to a squad mate as they search a building near the site of an explosion in Jakarta, Indonesia Thursday, Jan. 14, 2016. Attackers set off explosions at a Starbucks cafe in a bustling shopping area in Indonesia's capital and waged gunbattles with police Thursday, leaving bodies in the streets as office workers watched in terror from high-rise buildings.Tatan Syuflana/The Associated Press
Unlike most foreign visitors to Jakarta, I didn't stay at a glamorous hotel when I arrived a little over a year ago. Mindful of newspaper budgets, I was staying in an unassuming Airbnb apartment, and met a few sources in restaurants and smoky cafés near a shopping complex called the Sarinah, the Asian megacity's oldest department store. The rambling, rather worn-looking Sarinah was something of a reprieve from the hyper-secure luxury malls, hotels and skyscrapers that dominate the city's core.
But on Thursday, this quaint, comparatively low-slung and certainly low-security corner of Indonesia's capital was stormed by five gunmen and suicide bombers linked to Islamic State. One assailant detonated a bomb inside a Starbucks, while others shot down patrons as they ran outside. Two bombers blew themselves up near a police station. Around seven people died in total, including a Canadian, and many more were injured.
The blasts and violence shattered what had been a relatively peaceful period in Jakarta, and constituted the first major terrorist attack on the capital since two hotels were bombed in 2009. (The infamous Bali bombing, which killed more than 200 people, was in 2002.) Indonesia, a regional heavyweight with 250 million people, is the world's most populous Muslim country, and many have long feared the spread of Islamic State to Indonesia's unruly archipelago of 17,000 islands.
The Jakarta attack was a horrific surprise, and an example of the potential for IS to wage attacks across Southeast Asia, particularly through returnees from Syria and Iraq, or those with links to the front lines – where there is an Indonesian-speaking fighting unit. But this is not a sign that IS is overrunning Indonesia, for several reasons. The country sends far fewer foreign fighters to IS than France or the United Kingdom – roughly 1.4 fighters per million Muslims, compared with 14 in Australia and 40 in Belgium, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Then there's the death toll here. Five attackers, who all died in the lengthy attack, managed to kill just two people. Without minimizing the impact on the families of the victims, or those who were injured, that is an astoundingly measly figure for five terrorists in a crowded and congested metropolis of more than 10 million people, during a busy morning rush hour.
To be fair, the attack could have easily been much more violent – security forces found and disarmed numerous other explosives – but it wasn't. That's partly because Indonesia's security forces, who responded quickly, have become much better at handling terrorism from their experience with domestic groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah, which is linked to al-Qaeda, and its splinter organizations. Security forces foiled an earlier terrorist attack in August.
There is, of course, an element of luck to this: This attack was relatively contained, possibly even amateurish, while a chlorine bomb discovered in a Jakarta mall last March failed to go off. Still, police and military across the region have improved their ability to detect and handle the threat from both domestic terrorists and those coming back from Syria and Iraq – including in Malaysia, where security forces foiled two major bomb attacks by returnees.
None of this is to minimize the seriousness of terrorism in Indonesia. Police said the suspected planner of this week's attack, Bahrun Naim, a 32-year-old from Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo's hometown of Solo, planned and funded the terrorists from a base in Syria – and he wants to be the architect of IS attacks across Southeast Asia. Policy-makers were already on heightened alert for signs of IS, and this incident will only reinforce their efforts – particularly as Jokowi attempts to steer the country toward more stable and sustainable growth, economic reforms and an era of better infrastructure.
More broadly, though, and as others have said in the past, Indonesia's best bet against radical Islamist militants is the country's moderate, tolerant and peaceful Muslim population – followers of what scholars call "middle path" Islam. "Islam in Indonesia is very colourful. It's very relaxed. It's not meant as identity politics. That's why Islamic parties fair quite poorly," Islamic scholar and public intellectual Azyumardi Azra told me when I visited him at the Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University.
The country remains respected across the Muslim world, and a former president has publicly called IS "embarrassing" and "humiliating" to the faith. And though not always perfect for Christians, or its ethnic Chinese or Indian minorities, Indonesia is still an example of a vibrant, peaceful Muslim democracy.
As the attacks unfolded, social-media-savvy Indonesians took to Twitter with hashtags like #prayforjakarta and #KamiTidakTakut ("We're not afraid"). The morning after the attack, by all accounts, everything was back to normal: People were lining up for buses, eating at roadside snack stalls and going about their business without fear.
If IS hoped to strike terror into the hearts of Indonesia's moderate Muslims, they have failed – this time, at least.