Thus far, the police reported 10 deaths and 41 injured as a result of the multiple bombings in Surabaya (regional.kompas.com/read/2018/05/1…).
How do we make sense of the larger trends in terror attack casualties in Indonesia? Here's the scatter plot of the statistics since 1977 <THREAD>
How do we make sense of the larger trends in terror attack casualties in Indonesia? Here's the scatter plot of the statistics since 1977 <THREAD>
If we zoom in to the recent post-1998 period, we can see that terror attacks have killed over a hundred people and injured almost 200. But the over time trends suggest that we are nowhere near the heyday of terror attacks of early to mid 2000s in terms of scale and casualties 2/
The decline in the scale of attacks (and thus casualties) can be attributed to the various police efforts in thwarting all kinds of attacks by an ever-evolving number of groups. So I would caution us from radically abandoning the current criminal justice model of CT 3/
Since 1999, 61% of the attacks have had 6 targets: Police, Military, Religious institutions/figures, Business, Government (Diplomatic) and Government (General). The police has suffered the most attacks. 4/
There also appears to be a decline in attacks targeting religious figures/institutions, until recently where the trends are picking up along with attacks against police. This could suggest attempts at exacerbating religious cleavages and attacking the most successful CT actor 5/
Overall, we're not out of the woods, we shouldn't over-react (eg anti-terror law revision not panacea esp if we abandon criminal justice model), and we should pay more attention to longer term trends when debating and formulating CT policy options <END>
*UPDATED CORRECTION*: Apologies, as I did the stata codes at 3 AM, I input the wrong N summary below the legends. The data and graph are still accurate, I just noted the wrong N. The N for fatalities: 870 and injuries: 1,964. So almost a thousand killed and almost 2k injured.
*ADDITIONAL PATTERNS* Surabaya is an outlier location; per START Consortium data, the city has only seen 3 attacks since 1977 and the last one in 2001 was targeted at private citizen/property (Perhaps the fact that the perpetrator is JAD Surabaya cell leader is significant?)
Between 2000 and 2010, attacks in non-Java locations were always higher than Java (mostly because of Aceh, Ambon, Kalimantan, and Papua). But since 2010, attacks in Java have been increasing (almost 7/year on average), with more than half taking place in greater Jakarta area...
simultaneously, non-Java attacks have risen since 2010 (mostly Poso & Papua), approx 17/year on average (almost 3 times as much as Java). While Surabaya is an outlier, these trends suggest the growing difficulty to handling the increasingly diffused internal security threats.
Top 3 attack method since 2010: bombing/explosions, armed assault, infrastructure attacks. While these attacks have dramatically declined since 2000s, the trend is picking up and increasingly harder to defend against esp given Indonesia's lack of CT emergency management system
What these patterns suggest is that, yes, certain CT methods remain valuable to thwart "traditional" attacks (esp the role of police, noted above), but there is a broader CT management system that needs to be put in place as the nature of threat continues to evolve <END UPDATE>
