No matter what the president (or anyone else for that matter) wants to say about ISIS being contained or its territory being shrunk, the cancer of radical Islamist ideology has already metastasized and is spreading rapidly. The latest attack: Jakarta, Indonesia – a secular country with the largest Muslim population in the world.
As Fox News reports, “Attackers set off a series of explosions in a bustling shopping area of Indonesia’s capital city Thursday morning in what authorities said was an imitation of last November’s terror attacks in Paris that killed 130 people.
At least seven people had been killed in the five-hour attack, including five gunman, and 10 others were injured, Jakarta police said. It was unclear whether any other assailants remained at large.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the violence, but Indonesian national police spokesman Gen. Anton Charliyan said the attackers were likely linked to the ISIS terror group, saying, “They imitated the terror actions in Paris.”
Police had repeatedly warned in recent weeks that Islamic militants were planning something big in Jakarta, a city of 10 million people. It was the first major terror attack in Indonesia since the 2009 bombings of two hotels that killed seven people and injured more than 50. Before that, a bombing in a nightclub on the resort island of Bali in 2002 killed 202 people, mostly foreigners.
The police spokesman said the attack involved an unknown number of assailants with grenades and guns, including at least one person on a motorcycle.
