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BENARNEWS- Eighteen Indonesians who emigrated to the so-called Islamic State in Syria are in police custody after returning to their homeland on Saturday, police said.
The group reportedly includes a former high-ranking civil servant from Batam, an Indonesian island about 12 miles (18 km) from Singapore, who abandoned his post in August 2015 to go to Syria, as well as four other men, nine women and four children.
Police are questioning the individuals to determine to what degree they have been radicalized, and whether they joined IS, police spokesman Setyo Wasisto told BenarNews on Monday.
“Interrogation and interviews are still being carried by Densus 88 and BNPT," he said, referring to the counter-terrorism police and the National Counterterrorism Agency by its acronym.
The group, originally reported as 17 people, turned up at Ain Issa refugee camp near Raqqa in June, telling reporters they had been enticed to Syria two years earlier by the promise of a prosperous life in an Islamic State.
“The moment we entered ISIS territory, entered their country, we saw something far different than what they said on the Internet,” Nur, a 19-year-old Indonesian woman, was quoted as telling AFP news agency at the time.
Gone to Syria
Police announced Saturday that a group of 18 IS “volunteers” had arrived at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport near Jakarta that afternoon, via a post uploaded on a national police Instagram account.
“A team of Densus 88 antiterrorism police met them and took them to Police Mobile Brigade headaquarters inDepok, West Java, for questioning,” it said.
The group included former senior civil servant Dwi Djoko Wiwoho and his daughter Nurshadrina Khairadhania, Indonesian media outlets TribunNews and Sindobatam.com reported.
When he went missing, Djoko was director of the Indonesia Investment Coordinating Board's licensing office in the Riau Islands, which include Batam, the Straits Times reported. He left with his wife and three daughters, reports said at the time.
BNPT spokesman Nurfan Idris declined to provide information on the investigation into the 18 thus far.
“I’m sorry, I can’t yet,” he said.
In August 2016, Indonesian police said they had arrested six suspected IS-linked militants who were planning to launch a cross-border rocket attack on Singapore from Batam.
‘We don’t know for sure’
Ridlwan Habib, a terrorism expert at Indonesia University (UI), said the new arrivals would be screened to determine whether they pose a threat to society.
Indonesia’s anti-terrorism laws do not allow for them to be indefinitely detained, but they can be subjected to a certain degree of scrutiny under immigration regulations, he said.
“The problem is, we don’t know for sure how dangerous they are, or whether they no longer pose a problem,” he said.
Taufik Andrie, a terrorism analyst at the Institute for International Peacebuilding in Jakarta, agreed that police should determine whether the new arrivals were capable of carrying out acts of terror in their homeland.
“The results of the examination will need to be explained clearly, whether all of them were involved with ISIS, or were they just deceived, or what their activities were there,” he said, using another acronym for the terror group.
A Syria returnee attacked a police station in North Sumatra on the night of Idul Fitri in June, stabbing to death an officer and injuring another before he was killed, Taufik recalled.
“Their activities after repatriation should also be monitored. Don’t let it happen again that a radicalized person carries out an act of terror like in Medan,” he said.
Since 2015, about 430 Indonesians have been deported from Turkey after trying to cross into Syria. The figure includes 193 individuals in 2015; 60 in 2016; and 177 in the first six months of 2017, Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi told reporters in June.


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