The attackers struck in the commercial and diplomatic heart of Jakarta, a stretch of Jalan Thamrin lined with luxury hotels, embassies, and corporate offices. Their first target was a traffic police post at a major intersection. One blast went off in front of the Sarinah shopping mall, near a United Nations office. Footage captured two attackers huddling together outside a Burger King outlet when one of their suicide vests detonated prematurely, killing them both. Two other gunmen opened fire on the crowd that had gathered around the damaged police post. Photographs taken by a Tempo photojournalist showed one gunman shooting at police officers while onlookers scattered, then the second firing at a policeman at close range. The first gunman took two hostages -- a Dutchman and an Algerian -- into the Skyline building car park before both attackers were shot dead by police. The entire assault lasted roughly twenty-two minutes, a span so compressed that a counterterrorism film based on the events took its title from it.

The four civilians killed were strangers to one another, united only by proximity. Taher Amer-Ouali, a 70-year-old Algerian-Canadian hearing care specialist, was visiting family in Indonesia when he was shot. Rico Hermawan, 20 or 21, was an Indonesian who had been summoned to the police post for a traffic citation when a bomb exploded beside him. Sugito, a 43-year-old Indonesian courier, was initially misidentified as an attacker because he shared a name with a suspected terrorist -- a cruel postscript to an already senseless death. Rais Karna, 37, worked as an office boy at the Jakarta branch of Bangkok Bank. He survived the initial attack but died two days later from head wounds caused by a bullet. A Dutch UN official was seriously injured. Authorities later noted that some casualties had been hurt or killed while taking selfies near the blast site, drawn toward danger by the impulse to document it.

Jakarta police identified the mastermind as Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian extremist who had relocated to Raqqa, Syria, the de facto capital of the Islamic State's self-declared caliphate. Naim was no unknown quantity. Born in Pekalongan, Central Java, he had been arrested in Solo in November 2010 on suspicion of terrorism and convicted in June 2011 on weapons charges, though the court found insufficient evidence to convict him of terrorism directly. After his release, he left Indonesia for Syria and began maintaining a blog that praised attacks including the November 2015 Paris massacres, exhorting Indonesians to carry out similar operations at home. Among the four attackers who died was Afif Sunakim, whose image -- carrying a gun and rucksack on Jalan Thamrin -- became the defining photograph of the assault. Afif had previously served seven years for attending a militant training camp. The two suicide bombers were identified as Dian Juni Kurniadi and Ahmad Muhazab Saron, both 26. Connections to individuals in Malaysia suggested the network extended beyond Indonesian borders.

President Joko Widodo appeared on national television within hours, calling the events "acts of terror" and delivering a phrase that became the country's rallying cry: "We will not be defeated by these acts of terror." Indonesians adopted it instantly. The hashtag #KamiTidakTakut -- "We Are Not Afraid" -- spread across Twitter, accompanied by condolences and declarations of defiance. The speed of the public response reflected something deeper than social media reflexes. Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, had endured the 2002 Bali bombings, the 2003 Marriott attack, the 2004 Australian embassy bombing, and the 2009 hotel bombings. Each time, the country's democratic institutions and its tradition of pluralistic Islam had absorbed the shock without fracturing. The Sarinah Starbucks, where one of the blasts had occurred, reopened. Condolence flowers piled up outside the mall. Condemnations arrived from ASEAN, the European Union, the United Nations, and governments spanning Australia to Vietnam.

What distinguished the 2016 attacks from their predecessors was the operational model. The 2002 Bali bombings and the 2009 hotel strikes had been planned domestically by Jemaah Islamiyah operatives. The Thamrin attack was directed remotely by an Indonesian fighting abroad under the ISIS banner, using encrypted communications to coordinate with local cells. The scale was smaller -- eight dead rather than hundreds -- but the implications were larger. Indonesia's counterterrorism apparatus, built to dismantle hierarchical organizations like Jemaah Islamiyah, now faced a more diffuse challenge: radicalized individuals connected to a global network through the internet rather than through physical training camps. At least fifty Indonesians had traveled to Syria to join extremist groups by 2015, according to the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict. Each one represented not just a fighter lost abroad but a potential remote coordinator for attacks at home. The intersection at Sarinah has been repaired and redesigned. The police post was rebuilt. Traffic flows again through the spot where six explosions redefined what Indonesian security forces were up against.