Yogyakarta. President Joko Widodo indicated on Friday that the government was yet to take a position on whether Indonesians traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State should have their citizenship revoked.

Joko said on Friday that the government needed more time to assess the merit and the implications of removing the right to an Indonesian passport for those who chose to desert their country of origin in favor of a group claiming to be a state in its own right.

“It’s not time yet,” the president said in Yogyakarta, which he is visiting over the Nyepi holiday. “It might be the case later but it has not yet reached that point.”

Joko is under pressure to quell the flow of Indonesians joining the ranks of the group also known as ISIS. Terrorism in Indonesian has declined since the 2002 Bali bombings. Security and terrorism experts say the threat of mass-casualty attacks was greatly diminished by a successful state campaign to dismantle the international links and senior leadership of Al Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah, which was responsible for the Bali attacks in which 202 people were killed.

In recent years Indonesia’s main terror threat has been confined to a group of unsophisticated jihadists who have targeted police officers in opportunist killings, rather than foreigners in planned mass-casualty attacks.

It is understood that Indonesia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry is focused on trying to secure the deportation of 16 Indonesians who were recently detained in Turkey, allegedly on the way to being smuggled over the Syrian border.

“The government is still trying to come up with the best mechanism to repatriate the Syria-bound group, who have refused to be sent back to Indonesia,” Joko said.

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Source: The Jakarta Globe