Islamic State’s new breeding ground: Southeast Asia

A new volume edited by Senior Researcher Mona Kanwal Sheikh sheds light on the activities of Islamic State and al-Qaeda in four Southeast Asian states: the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. The region is puzzling as it has not experienced contemporary Western-led military interventions and has until recently avoided the internationalisation and escalation of local Islamist conflicts due to factors such as the existence of political channels for voicing Islamist aspirations, and government repression. And yet Islamic State are aggressively pursuing a local expansion – with success.

The region has not only witnessed a series of terrorist attacks attributed to IS-affiliated groups in Southeast Asia but IS have formally added a new Southeast Asian province to their landscape of IS provinces: Wilayat Sharq Asiyya. From an IS perspective the self-declared province spans Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Southern Thailand and Myanmar. A remarkable feature of the attacks is that they are often targeted at places of worship, hence creating tensions among different faith communities and accentuating the image of a religious war.

The volume sheds light on the different dynamics that characterize the four countries to explain the presence or absence of transnational jihadist activity. The cases display a variation of trends: in some cases returnees from Iraq and Syria have been implicated in attacks in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines or in supporting local IS affiliates, in some cases these have been encouraged more directly by IS leadership, and again in other cases there have been no logistical or operational linkages between the core leadership and the local actors.

The cases examined in the book can potentially teach us something about the linkage between local insurgency and transnational jihadism, as they cover three conflict areas where armed insurgencies have appeared: Thailand's southernmost provinces in Pattani, Mindanao and the Sulu islands in Bangsamoro in the Philippines, and Aceh in Indonesia.

The case of Thailand, where the transnational jihadi appeal has remained limited, opens a central question that deserves more focus in future research on transnational jihad: why do some local conflicts get enlarged and redefined as a global ideological battle, while others successfully remain local?