Chaos as stunning militant attack unfolded in Jakarta

Jeremy Douglas had not seen anything like what he was witnessing from his office window at the United Nations building in central Jakarta: the police exchanging gunfire with militants amid a series of blasts at a key intersection of Indonesia’s capital.

“Serious exchange of fire in downtown #Jakarta. Didn’t experience this in 3.5 years in #Pakistan,” Mr Douglas, the regional representative of the UN office on drugs and crime, wrote in a series of tweets on Thursday.

“Amazing how some folks are walking and some running. Kind of a denial or something,” he said in another tweet, referring to the pandemonium on the street below that took almost three hours to bring under control.

He had just gotten out of his car to enter the UN building with a colleague “when a massive #bomb went off”, he tweeted. “Chaos and we’re going into lockdown.”

M.Y. Farooqui, general manager with the Dubai-based firm OHME, was having breakfast at the Sari Pan Pacific Hotel next to Sarinah’s when he heard a massive blast.

“Hotel is locked up from all sides and no one is allowed to go out or in. May God bless us,” he wrote in a Facebook message to a Reuters reporter.

Daily life mostly continued as normal across the usually traffic-clogged city, and the hashtag #KamiTidakTakut — “we are not afraid” — was trending among Indonesian Twitter users.

Indonesia has seen attacks by Islamist militants before, but a coordinated assault by a team of suicide bombers and gunmen was unprecedented and has echoes of the sieges seen in Mumbai seven years ago and in Paris in November 2015.

‘Regional fears over ISIS now confirmed’ A “Par-is-style” suicide strike on the Indonesian capital on Thursday confirmed So-utheast Asian governments’ worst fears — that citizens returning from fighting alongside ISIS in the Middle East could launch attacks at home.

Regional nations have been warning for months of the possibility of attack. The blasts and gunfire that rocked Jakarta came after six years of relative calm, following a government crackdown that weakened the country’s homegrown Islamic networks.

“We know that (ISIS) has the desire to declare a province in this region and there are groups in this region... That have pledged allegiance to (ISIS),” said Kumar Ram-akrishna, an expert on southeast Asian militant groups. “The threat of returning Southeast Asi-an fighters radicalised in the Iraq/Syria region (is) also another factor of concern, together with the possibility of self-radicalised lone wolves appearing in the scene.”

Meanwhile, Philippines security forces expressed concern over an “emerging threat” of terrorism. “Our security forces are well aware of the emerging threat and have been conducting operations to prevent terror acts anywhere in the country,” said the Phillipines police on the Jakarta incident.