Failure to Launch: The Islamic State’s Misadventures in Malaysia

By Munira Mustaffa

This week’s guest post is written by Munira Mustaffa, a researcher and scholar of counterterrorism who has published on the Islamic State’s unsteady attempts to gain a foothold in her native country of Malaysia and Southeast Asia more broadly. The Islamic State’s efforts to use foreign fighters that arrived in Syria (and Iraq before that) as the foundation for their global expansion has been documented in recent books like Aaron Zelin’s Your Sons at Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad. Chapter 8: Global War of The ISIS Reader explores at this aspect of the Islamic State’s “external operations” that has earned the group a fearsome reputation. As former spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani said in his speech “Indeed, Your Lord is ever watchful” which is the focus of this chapter: “Who are you, O Soldiers of the Islamic State? From where have you come? What is your secret? Why is it that the hearts of the East and West are dislocated by their fear of you?”(p.180, The ISIS Reader). Munira analyses the spread of this fear to Malaysia and offers her perspective on the role of law enforcement to disrupt the group’s spread in the region before it becomes entrenched. Facing a global threat, a diversity of voices, each with their own local knowledge of the societies that are fighting the Islamic State, are essential for understanding this threat and devising better strategies to confront it. We look forward to featuring guest posts from other authors with unique country and regional expertise in the coming months.

For counter-terrorism strategies to be effective, they must be founded in a realistic appraisal of the reach and capabilities of terror groups. And yet, too often they are constructed on the basis of abstract notions of a hyped threat rather than specific national vulnerabilities. As Brian Jenkins noted long ago, terrorism is theater and its impacts on a nation’s psyche can be hard to predict or manage. Malaysia presents an example where a single, low casualty ‘lone wolf’ attack generated an entirely new framework of assumptions about future threats and consequently distorted the country’s dialogue over counter-terrorism policies and strategy.

The Movida Bar grenade attack in June of 2016 was considered to be Malaysia’s first successful Islamic State terror attack. The Inspector General of Police of the Royal Malaysian Police (PDRM) confirmed that the attack was put into motion by Muhammad Wanndy (Abu Hamzah Al-Fateh), a known Islamic State militant who had travelled with his wife from Malaysia to Syria in 2014. The attack injured eight, and in the wake of the confirmation of Islamic State involvement, anxieties were rife that this event was just the beginning of a new terror campaign in Malaysia by “lone wolf” cells inspired by Wanndy’s call-to-action and his adventurism in Syria. This fear was exacerbated when Wanndy refuted this charge in a Facebook post made from Syria, maintaining that the PDRM was scapegoating him, and threatened he would retaliate on behalf of those who were “persecuted” by Malaysian authorities by launching large scale attacks in Malaysia. The attack, compounded with the denial of responsibility and possibility that more actors were involved, helped create the type of news headlines that terrorists dream of.

Lost in the panic was a rational assessment of the value, meaning and attractiveness of the target in terms of terrorist selection and strategy. In retrospect, the Movida attack proved to be the kickoff of a failed terror campaign, and exposed the movement’s thin reach into Malaysia. The Movida Bar, located in the town of Puchong, may seem like an obvious Islamic State target because of the crowd who had gathered there to watch the UEFA Euro 2016 match—a sport (soccer/football) that the Islamic State denigrates as un-Islamic. But in the grand scheme of things, the attack’s target fell short of serving the group’s lofty rhetoric and its low impact and level of sophistication failed to match the group’s fearsome reputation from Syria and Iraq. Later investigations revealed that Movida Bar was not even the original intended target of the attack. When the attackers discovered that their intended target was already closed for the night, they selected the Movida Bar at random — indicating a lack of preparation and planning. The entire incident should have been interpreted as a sign of the local group’s weakness, inexperience and immaturity, similar to what was observed amongst the perpetrators of the 2004 Madrid Bombings. Once reports leaked that Islamic State also viewed the follow-on campaign as a failure, Wanndy came under severe pressure to prove himself and his ability to launch attacks from afar in his native land. Spurred to action by the Movida Bar grenade attack, the PDRM’s intelligence capabilities PDRM’s intelligence capabilities immediately intensified their pressure on the local Islamic State cells and stopped any planned attacks before they could be executed.

The dynamics of Wanndy attempting to direct attacks in Malaysia from Syria led to some confusion over whether these attacks were conducted by “lone wolves” or “wolf packs” as described by both the media and the PDRM, or stable and organized clandestine cells. The term lone wolf has been criticized as highly inaccurate, and implying a loose association and connection to the mother group. We only learned later that many of Islamic State’s external attacks worldwide were actually directed remotely by recruiters from afar, exposing yet another misjudgment by authorities who should have refrained from publicly overestimating the severity of the “wolf pack” problem. This speculation led to rumors that there were disparate phantom Islamic State cells operating and plotting the next terrorist attack. In hindsight, the capabilities of these disparate groups were overhyped, and inaccurately portraying their threat served no purpose other than to needlessly raise public alarm. Instead, it would have been far more beneficial to appreciate that these isolated and murky terrorist activities were in fact collective actions with operational direction.

By identifying local Islamic State actors that were mobilizing themselves not hierarchically, but as networked formation, the PDRM would have been quicker at recognizing that these militant members were not only experiencing difficulties in waging collective violence, but they were also risking loss of agility, efficacy and resilience by exposing themselves for the benefit of Islamic State’s global project. What looked like a major counter-terrorism failure—the first successful Islamic State directed attack in Malaysia—instead turned out to be a rare opportunity to crush an immature network in its infancy. As the fear of additional attacks waned, the public accepted the notion that the PDRM had developed effective counterterrorism tactics as part of a larger strategy that produced results, and diminished the very real potential the Islamic State had in making inroads into Malaysian Islamist circles.

Islamic State goals of making inroads in an area quite new to them were not fantastical. Malaysian Islamic State sympathizers had hoped to exacerbate varying levels of civil instability, such as the “1Malaysia Development Berhad” scandal that enveloped Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Mohammad Najib Razak’s premiership and robbed him of moral authority, thus delegitimizing his brand of moderate Islam. Terrorist groups like the Islamic State are often waiting for opportunities to exploit poor and corrupt governance to put forward their own, allegedly superior model. The persistent messaging efforts by both Islamic State Media Department and local members were indicative of endeavors to generate popular support for the group to gain credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of Muslims in the region. Due to the group’s persuasive messaging, scores of Malaysians had gone to Iraq and Syria to fight for the caliphate. Equally worrying, many of Islamic State’s propaganda provided instructions on launching individual attacks, including bomb-making and vehicle ramming attack strategies. Abu Muhammad al-Adnani’s call-to-action (from the speech in the ISIS Reader cited above), which invited Muslims around the world to launch attacks wherever they were in support of the group, produced just one unsophisticated attack with no follow-up. Worse for the group, its Malaysian connection were effectively severed when Mohammad Wanndy was killed in Syria in April 2017.

After its initial success in preventing more attacks, the Malaysian government established counter-narrative efforts involving public-private partnership and bilateral and multilateral international partners to combat jihadist propaganda in order to dismantle its support and recruitment efforts and prevent any potential attacks. Strict anti-terrorism laws were introduced – for instance, anyone who is caught downloading and storing the IS materials would be criminally charged. However, the tougher terrorism laws raise concerns that they may curtail human rights because of the amorphous nature in which these laws defined terrorism.

In retrospect, the success of these counterterrorism efforts forced Islamic State’s Malaysian cells to go further to ground, limited their connectivity with the hub in Syria. Lone actors would have the advantage of acting with autonomy and the effectiveness of decentralized actions, while producing the types of attacks that could inspire mobilization. While this kind of “leaderless resistance” could adapt to a robust contemporary security environment that is designed to focus on groups mobilized as organizations to diminish, nevertheless the switch is a signal that the movement/organization is facing such a strong security environment that they are unable to organize effective resistance otherwise. It is the strategy for the incredibly weak.

The survival of any particular extremist group is a product of many factors, but this status does not confer any correlated ability to impact local political dynamics. One lesson we can take away from the Malaysian experience is that overestimating terrorist capabilities and efficiency can be as dangerous as underestimating it when it comes to policy making. Counter-terrorism responses need to be formulated with this experience in mind, addressing the threat without impacting civilians and their rights. The Islamic State influence in Malaysia turned out to be negligible. In the case of the 2016 Movida Bar grenade attack, poor target selection and a weak follow-up hurt the group’s mobilization efforts to build on the initial attack. The PDRM was right to work to delegitimize the presence of the Islamic State in Malaysia, but miscalculated by speculating in the press as to their character by calling them “lone wolves” and “wolf packs.” Counter-terror planning and operations, therefore, should understand terrorists’ default assumptions and choices in order to predict, and take advantage of, their possible mistakes, and to apply pressure at critical junctures in order to make those mistakes more probable.

From a global perspective, it reveals a serious weakness in the Islamic State’s vision for a global caliphate. Foreign fighter flow, severely reduced at current levels, were crucial for it to gain access to places like Malaysia. But this did not guarantee a transmission of knowledge and experience to the home-grown cells there, and they withered on the vine faced with competent counter-terrorism tools like effective intelligence and policing. The Islamic State cannot succeed in expanding globally simply by making speeches, and directing terror attacks like the Movida Bar grenade incident. How the group evolves or learns from this will be something to watch in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. 

Munira Mustaffa is a security practitioner focusing on terrorism and counter-terrorism.