An audacious attack by suicide bombers in the heart of Indonesia’s capital was funded by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group, police said Friday, as they seized an ISIS flag from the home of one of the attackers and carried out raids across the country in which one suspected militant was killed.
National police chief Gen. Badrodin Haiti told reporters that Thursday’s attack was funded by ISIS through Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian who spent one year in jail for illegal possession of weapons in 2011, and is now in Syria fighting for the group.
Supporters of ISIS also circulated a claim of responsibility for the attack on Twitter late Thursday. The radical group controls territory in Syria and Iraq, and its ambition to create an Islamic caliphate has attracted some 30,000 foreign fighters from around the world, including a few hundred Indonesians and Malaysians.
The ISIS link, if proved, poses a challenge to Indonesian security forces. Until now, the group was known only to have sympathizers with no active cells capable of planning and carrying out a plot such as Thursday’s in which five men attacked a Starbucks cafe and a traffic police booth with handmade bombs, guns and suicide belts. They killed two people, one a Canadian and the other an Indonesian, and injured 20 in the first major attack in Indonesia since 2009. The militants were killed, either by their suicide vests or by police.
The attack “was funded by ISIS in Syria through Bahrun Naim,” Haiti told reporters after Friday prayers. He did not elaborate.
He also identified one of the five attackers as Sunakim, who in 2010 was sentenced to seven years in jail for his involvement in military-style training in Aceh, but was released early.
Police conducted raids across Indonesia but was it unclear whether those arrested were suspected of links to the bombing or if police were rounding up militants as part of a broader crackdown in its aftermath.
About 200 people, mostly youngsters with flowers in their hands, gathered in front of the Starbucks in a show of sympathy for the victims and solidarity against extremist violence. They unfurled posters that read, “We are not afraid.”

By The Associated Press Jakarta, Indonesia Friday, 15 January 2016