{{Emilia Az opens a folder on her Blackberry labelled “Wahhabis” and flicks through her recent messages.
One is a cartoon depiction of an Arab fighter holding a necklace lined with severed heads. Another is a masked Indonesian man holding aloft the Islamic State flag.}}
“I get text messages like these all the time now. They have said they know where I live, that I will be killed. They said, ‘If you don’t turn to Sunni, back to the real path of Islam, we will behead you’,” Emilia says.
“Sometimes they throw stones at my house. Once I had a dog, a great dane, and they killed him with a big stone, like they wanted to show me that, ‘I know your house, and we are here’.”
As a Shia Muslim, and a representative for an Indonesian interfaith organisation supporting the rights of religious minorities, Emilia is a visible target for hardline elements of the Sunni majority in the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
The threats against her have so far proved empty, and she’s used to the abuse. But as the Islamic State group (IS) has gained international media attention, the messages she receives have increasingly adopted the sinister imagery of the conflict unfolding in Iraq and Syria.
As many as 200 Indonesian jihadists are believed to have travelled to fight with Islamic State, and Indonesia’s counter-terrorist forces are concerned that those returning could be emboldened to carry out acts of terrorism on home soil.
aljazeera
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