After the capitulation of the Imperial Japanese Army to the Allied forces, the Moluccan soldiers acted equally defiantly towards the Indonesian revolutionaries trying to fill the power vacuum left by the Japanese. Smaller scale conflicts in the Bersiap period between regrouped Moluccan fighting units and Permuda groups usually left the well-trained Moluccan fighters victorious. In their efforts to subdue the counter revolutionary RMS movement on Ambon, the newly established Tentara Nasional Indonesia (Republican Indonesian army, TNI) encountered the military prowess of the Moluccan special troops. The heavy fighting triggered them to create their own special troops. At that time the Moluccan special troops' only contemporaries were the Gurkha units of the British Indian Army.