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Indonesia's grim new challenge: children carrying bombs
Sydney Morning Herald - May 18, 2018
She was nine when she died but here she is younger, adorable in a hot pink hijab with ruffles. The Facebook account is typical of besotted mothers the world over.
There are multiple photos of Ita, as she was nicknamed, posing with her siblings. She is snapped coquettishly holding a rose, in front of an Angry Birds stuffed toy, perched on a bicycle carriage, hoisted on her brother's shoulder and at the beach.
This window into an apparently happy family life makes what happened on Sunday, May 13, all the more incomprehensible.
At 7.45am Ita, her mother and her 12-year-old sister tried to enter a church in Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city, which has a large ethnic Chinese Christian population. Explosives were strapped to their waists. When a security guard stopped them, they blew themselves up.
A week later Indonesia is still reeling from a wave of terror attacks Wikipedia has already dubbed the 2018 Surabaya bombings.
Ita's mother, Puji Kuswati, had not been acting alone. Ita's father, Dita Oeprianto, and two older brothers targeted two other churches in a coordinated attack that day.
Within 24 hours there were two further bombings, in an apartment complex and outside a police station. These were detonated by two families who had met regularly with Ita's family to study the Koran and watch jihadist movies on Sunday evenings.
The Surabaya attacks – 27 people including the bombers were killed and another 50 wounded – are the deadliest in Indonesia since the 2002 Bali bombing.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks in a message carried on its Amaq propaganda arm. It emerged Dita was the leader of the Surabaya cell of Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (Congregation of Supporters of the [Islamic] State), an extreme Islamist network that has pledged allegiance to IS.
But what shocked Indonesia most was the unprecedented use of child suicide bombers in the country. Just days before Ita died, neighbours heard her pleading for a new dress for the Islamic holiday of Lebaran next month.
"If she knew she was going to die that Sunday, why would she cry for a new dress for Lebaran?" asks a horrified Indonesian police officer, who witnessed one of the bombings. "They [the parents] are not human. Especially the father."
Child suicide bombers have been used in other modern conflicts, including by Palestinian militant groups and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
A ghastly video to emerge from the Syrian conflict in December 2016 purported to show nine-year-old "Fatima" about to carry out a "martyrdom operation" in Damascus.
The film suggested "this duty fell to children" because the fighting men had fled "in the green buses", a reference to the evacuation of Aleppo at that time. It is unknown whether the attack was carried out.
And a 2017 UNICEF report said an "alarming" number of children in Africa – most of them girls – had been used as suicide bombers by Nigeria's militant Islamist group Boko Haram.
However counter-terrorism analyst Noor Huda Ismail says it is an "extremely disturbing new development" in Indonesia.
"The Indonesian government must take this seriously because now you see the level of brutality, the level of pragmatism. They do not mind even sacrificing a member of their family."
The chilling family bombings have implications that could ripple across the world.
"What it means is that the types of potential attackers has been further broadened," says Greg Fealy, an associate professor at the Australian National University.
"It's a bit like the decision that terrorists made some time ago, in the Middle East certainly, to use women as suicide bombers precisely because they held better prospects of getting through security than men did. Normally children would not have attracted close attention from security services. From now on that will have to change."
Even at the height of the influence of Jemaah Islamiyah, the terrorist group responsible for the Bali bombings, only an adult male would ever be considered a warrior, according to terrorism analyst Sidney Jones.
But IS had managed to turn the concept of jihad into a family affair, with a role for everyone.
"Women were 'lionesses', children were 'cubs'," Jones writes on The Lowy Institute's website. "Everyone was given a sense of mission... The problem was that many of the women were not satisfied with the very traditional role [IS] assigned them. Some, as we know from observing social media, wanted more action and admired women suicide bombers in Palestine, Iraq and Chechnya."
Jones and other analysts believe the involvement of whole families in terrorist attacks means deradicalisation programs need a rethink. "It means deradicalisation has to happen as a family – it can't only be aimed at the men," she says.
This is something long argued by Noor Huda Ismail, best known in Indonesia for trying to re-integrate former terrorists into mainstream society by employing them at his deradicalisation cafe in Solo, Java.
Two years ago Huda made the documentary Jihad Selfie, which explores how Indonesian teenagers are recruited to IS.
The film's protagonist – would-be jihadist Teuku Akbar Maulana – cites his closeness to his parents and "the pain of giving birth" as the reason he ultimately decided not to join IS.
"I have been warning the Indonesian government to go beyond the traditional tool of deradicalisation focusing on the father," Huda says. "As I said in my films... [families] are a very important agent in countering violent extremism."
In Wonorejo Asri, a middle-class neighbourhood in Surabaya, an empty swing dangles opposite Ita's home, now boarded up with plywood and draped with police line tape.
Wery Tri Kusuma used to watch Ita and her sister "Lala" (Fadhila Sari) play on this swing. Ita played with his 11-year-old son too, right up until the day before the attack. "If Ita saw my wife she would sit on her lap. We have only one child, my son, so she was like our own daughter."
Wery's wife was close to Ita's mother Puji; they would talk about cooking and Wery's wife would ask for advice on how to get children to be obedient.
"Our son, if we want him to do anything, we have to repeat ourselves before he listens. Her four kids, she never once raised her voice to them. They would follow instantly."
At midday on Sunday police showed Wery photographs of the church bombings. "When I saw the photos, especially the one of Ita, my mind went blank. Her upper body was intact, but just that, the other half gone..."
His eyes well with tears. "The bombs must have been strapped to their bodies too. What went through their [the parents'] minds when doing that? Ita, she likes to cuddle, she knew nothing. She was just a child."
The Surabaya bombings came just days after a deadly riot – also by members of Jemaah Anshorut Daulah (JAD) – was staged at a maximum-security detention centre outside Jakarta.
Prisoners seized weapons held at the centre as evidence in court cases and killed five police officers, some of whom were tortured and had their throats slit.
Indonesia has been plunged into a jittery mourning. On Wednesday the carnage continued, with police shooting dead four sword-wielding men who attacked a police station in Sumatra.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo, who condemned the Surabaya attacks as "barbaric" and "beyond humanity", urged the House of Representatives to amend laws that would give police greater powers to arrest and detain terror suspects.
Police initially claimed the church bombers had received training from IS in Syria, although this was later retracted. It is now believed Ita's father, Dita, was influenced by a family who had tried to join IS but was deported from Turkey.
Former Australian Border Force commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg warns of the risk of those frustrated in attempts to join IS in Syria or Iraq staging attacks on Indonesian soil.
"I raised the spectre of this when we saw large numbers of people attempting to leave Australia for Syria," he says. "What we are seeing for the first time is the manifestation of violence IS is franchising to foreign fighters and now to the world."
More than 500 Indonesian IS supporters are still believed to be in Syria. Hundreds more have been killed, deported back to Indonesia or returned voluntarily. "They are going to be gravitating towards JAD ideology and that is going to be a recipe for more violence," Quaedvlieg says.
He says Australia is more secure because it has a stronger border control system and a "fair idea" of who has gone to the Middle East. "We are much better off than Indonesia in terms of knowing where our threats have come from, but we can't be complacent."
Indonesia would brief Australia on the outcome of its investigation into the Surabaya attacks, Quaedvlieg says. However he doubts there will be radical changes to security in Australia as a result: "Australia doesn't want every child, every pram searched at a sporting event, that's not who we are."
The day after Ita was killed, two motorcyclists detonated suicide bombs at the Surabaya police headquarters. Police had just managed to drag officers to safety and secure the perimeter when they heard someone moan with pain.
"We shouted: 'Stand up, Stand Up!'. Everyone of us wanted to help, but the car was on fire and there might still be a bomb," says narcotics unit chief Roni Faisal. Then he realised the victim was a young girl. Roni didn't hesitate. He scooped her up and raced to safety. "All I could think of was that she needed to be saved," he says.
Eight-year-old Ais had been sitting at the front of one of the motorbikes. Her parents and two brothers were killed in the blasts. "I don't think she knows what happened, I think her parents lied to her and told her that they were going for a ride," Roni says. "She cried for help, she stood up. She wanted to live."
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