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View all search resultsNo leader, no ideology: Indonesia’s new terror threat
Indonesia spent 20 years mastering the art of dismantling terrorist organizations. Its next threat will not have an organization to dismantle.
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A janitor sweeps the floor after a homemade bomb blast at Madrasah Aliyah Negeri (MAN) 3 Padang in West Sumatra on July 14, 2026. (Antara/Fitra Yogi)
W
ithin just a few months this year, police intercepted bomb plots at three separate state schools: SMA 72 Jakarta state senior high school, SMP 3 Sungai Raya state junior high school in West Kalimantan, and MAN 3 Padang Islamic senior high school in West Sumatra.
Three schools. Three near-misses. Three teenagers who, on paper, are not terrorists at all.
It is not that the bombs were fake, investigators recovered three viable devices at MAN 3 Padang alone. Yet when law enforcement reviewed the cases, none met the legal definition of terrorism. There was no network behind them. No leader. No group membership. No co-conspirators. Just an isolated teenager, a grudge and an internet connection.
This should be a flashing alarm.
For two decades, Densus 88, the National Police’s elite counterterrorism unit, has done exemplary work dismantling networks like Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) piece by piece. That strategy succeeds when terrorism is structural, defined by a chain of command, a hierarchy and an organization you can scale and sever at the top.
However, the teenagers now populating police reports were never part of JI or any other conventional cell. They gravitated toward violence through gaming chatrooms, meme boards and algorithms programmed to serve increasingly radical content. It is the digital equivalent of wandering into a dangerous neighborhood simply because a navigation app kept nudging you, one turn at a time, until you no longer realized how far you had strayed.
Indonesia built its counterterrorism apparatus to fell trees; it now faces a threat that spreads like weeds.
