Malaysia’s top counter-terrorism official said Myanmar faces a growing risk of attacks by Islamic State (IS) followers in the name of persecuted Rohingya Muslims.
Ayob Khan Mydin Pitchay, the head of the Malaysian police counter-terrorism division, told Reuters this week that one such attack has already been thwarted by Malaysian authorities.
The suspect, an unidentified Indonesian factory worker who had been in Malaysia since 2014, was due to be charged yesterday for possession of materials linked to terrorist groups, which carries a seven-year jail term or fine.
The suspect was among seven people arrested for suspected links to IS and was also involved in a plot to smuggle weapons to Indonesia’s Poso region, on Sulawesi island, Ayob Khan told Reuters.
He said other militants are likely to attempt to follow the Indonesian suspects’ lead in support of the Rohingya.
The police official also told Reuters the suspect had been in contact with Muhammad Wanndy Muhammad Jedi, a Syria-based Malaysian militant who claimed responsibility on behalf of IS for a grenade attack on a bar in June last year.
However, he did not say whether the suspect had been in contact with Harakah al-Yakin – the Rohingya militant organization identified by International Crisis Group (ICG) as the one behind the October 9 attacks on the Myanmar police installations. The attacks were followed by a campaign of “clearance operations” supposedly aimed at apprehending insurgents, but dozens of reports of rape, summary execution and arson perpetrated by the Myanmar military against Rohingyas have emerged over the last few months.
A report published by ICG said Harakah al-Yakin has links to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, but also warned against “over-interpret[ing] the significance of the international links”.
“The longer violence continues, the greater the risks become of such links deepening and potentially becoming operational,” the ICG report said.
Scores of militants from Southeast Asia have travelled to the Middle Eat to join IS. Badrul Hisham Ismail, a program executive director of the Malaysian counter-militancy group Iman Research, told Reuters: “The network between Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and the Rohingyas is there.”
In November, an Islamic State-linked militant was detained by Indonesian authorities before carrying out an attack on the Myanmar embassy there.
Rohan Gunaratna, a security expert at Singapore’s Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told Reuters: “The Rohingya conflict is emerging as one of the rallying issues for IS. At a strategic level, Myanmar should resolve the Rohingya conflict to prevent IS influence and expansion.”
