It’s beginning to look a lot like … jihad.
If not everywhere you go, then at least in Indonesia, where 192,000 security personnel are being deployed ahead of Christmas to guard people in the Muslim-majority nation against jihadists, Mailonline reports.
The 260-million-population Southeast Asian archipelago has significant numbers of Christians, Hindus and Buddhists who have been targeted in the past by radical Islamists.
Earlier this week authorities said police and military personnel would be deployed to secure Christmas and New Year’s Eve festivities, including in easternmost Papua, a majority Christian area.
The deployment, which comes after recent attacks, exceeds the 167,000 personnel deployed last year.
‘Based on intelligence data, there are potential risks… so we’re taking preventive measures but we are also ready to take proactive action,’ he added.
Many past attacks in Indonesia, which has dozens of groups loyal to the violent ideology of ISIS, have been against police and other symbols of the state.
Authorities routinely arrest suspected ISIS-linked jihadis ahead of alleged planned attacks.
In October Indonesian President Joko Widodo ordered beefed-up security after two militants from an IS-linked terror group stabbed his chief security minister. He survived the assassination plot. Last month a suicide bomber exploded at a police station in Sumatra, killing himself and wounding six civilians.
Hundreds were rounded up after the attacks, which came more than a year after a suicide bomber family killed a dozen congregants in attacks at churches in Indonesia’s second-biggest city, Surabaya.
