Indonesian women's 'long and difficult' journey to deradicalisation in fight against extremism

Reuters

The increased role of radical female militants in Indonesia has been highlighted in recent events. In October an armed woman tried to break into Indonesia's presidential palace. Raised by her grandmother, while her parents worked in a city nearby, Nisfi excelled in chemistry and maths at school, but also stood out for reciting the Quran.

Instead of going to university, she wanted to "learn the Quran by heart" at a school in Situbondo, East Java, which she found online.– an Islamic boarding school – which was affiliated with radical groups that "wanted to turn Indonesia into an Islamic State", Nisfi was told she could get a scholarship to study in the Middle East.

Jazuli, 55, started asking her parents about her life and began looking into the Islamic school she had joined. He didn't like what he found. Nisfi tried to escape after members of the radical group reached out to her. But Jazuli, once more, was able to intervene.Nisfi said the transition period was difficult. "I was really disoriented," she said. "I needed to be forced to have a change of heart … it took about a year and a half to realise that those ideas they were feeding me were not right."

The arrest of hundreds of people each year in Indonesia suggested they were "very large" and "resilient" networks, he noted. Indonesia's State Intelligence Agency last year said 85 per cent of the country's millennials had been exposed to radicalism. In Indonesia, he said, "women have been on the front lines of preventing and responding to violent extremism, leading their communities to build social cohesion, tolerance, and trust."

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