Asia Times, Sep 12, 2006
Southeast Asia In the shadow of terror
By Chris Holm
JAKARTA - On the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United
States, the status, leadership and future of Southeast Asia's main alleged
al-Qaeda-linked terror group, Jemaah Islamiya (JI), is under question.
The United State! s has identified JI high on its list of global terrorist organizations,
and since September 11 the shadowy radical group has been the target of US-guided
assaults in the southern Philippines, clandestine Central Intelligence Agency-led
counter-terrorism operations in Thailand, and a US-trained and financed
counter-terrorism crack force in Indonesia.
Last week, three alleged JI members were among the 14 detainees who were moved
to Guantanamo Bay after the US held them for more than three years at undisclosed
secret prisons, possibly in Thailand. Of them, Riduan Isamuddin , also known as
Hambali, was the group's operations chief and the alleged main link with al-Qaeda.
US President George W Bush has said that while in detention Hambali admitted that
17 JI operatives had been groomed for attacks inside the United States, possibly
using aircraft. It's unclear, of course, whether those confessions were made under
harsh interrogation conditions, or even torture, at secret US-administered prisons.
At the same time, regional terrorism experts contend that the group intends through
violent means to create a pan-regional Islamic state encompassing Indonesia,
Malaysia and Muslim areas in the southern Philippines and southern Thailand.
JI garnered global attention after the now-notorious October 12, 2002, bombing of a
nightclub on Bali island that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians. Thereafter,
the group in 2003 attacked the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, followed by the 2004 blast in
front of the Australian Embassy. The second Bali bomb attacks on three crowded
restaurants popular with foreign tourists last year continued a post-September 11
pattern of one attack per year.
Still, the radical Islamic group has been hobbled in recent years by the arrest and
detention of at least 200 of its suspected members. So, is JI a spent force or a potent
threat for more terror and destruction? Asia Times Online interviewed the region's
pre-eminent authority on JI, as well as a self-confessed former member of the terror
group, to address the many questions now swirling around JI's capabilities and future.
Pattern of violence
Sidney Jones, an expert on JI with the International Crisis Group, believes another
high-profile attack is possible this year, saying the group's determination to continue
its pattern of violence is "high".
"Once you have suicide bombers in the mix it becomes impossible to accurately
predict exactly how and where an attack will take place," she said in an interview with
Asia Times Online. "But what we do know from the documents found after the second
Bali bombings is that there indeed was a determination to have at least one attack a
year."
When Jones speaks of "they", however, she doesn't necessarily mean JI as once
popularly conceived. Rather, she is talking about a JI offshoot led by native Malaysian
Noordin Mohammad Top, the group's terror financier, recruiter and alleged attack
planner.
Noordin's name surfaced shortly after the 2003 Marriott Hotel attack in Jakarta, and
he is believed to have played a key role in all the big terror-related bombings that have
occurred in Indonesia since. Atop Indonesia's counter-terrorism hit list, he has
successfully evaded what has been described as the largest police manhunt in
Indonesia's history.
His compatriot and deputy, bomb-maker Azahari bin Husin, dubbed the "demolition
man" for his skill in rigging home-made bombs, wasn't as lucky. The former science
lecturer from Malaysia's Johor Baru University was killed in a police swoop on a small
house in Java last year. In that raid, police shot Azahari to death, while his
bomb-making student, a young man known as Jahir, blew himself up with plastic
explosives that both men had already strapped to their bodies.
Azahari's killing, says Jones, was another blow to a group already feeling extreme
pressure from the Indonesian authorities. Since the first Bali attacks in 2002,
Indonesian police have arrested or detained more than 200 JI members, apparently
driving the group further underground and prompting others spooked by the roundups
to abandon the radical cause.
Frequent raids and tighter security, Jones says, were the reason Noordin's group did
not use car bombs in the last Bali attack, but instead chose to deploy smaller
backpack devices. "They also didn't think they could have a team renting a place in
Bali to assemble such a bomb without getting detected, and if they are worried about
that level of vigilance, then the Indonesian authorities have done a pretty good job,"
she said.
Meanwhile, the main three perpetrators of the first Bali bombings, preacher Ali
Ghufron, alias Mukhlas, the "smiling bomber" Amrozi, and Imam Samudra are all now
on death row. Hambali, JI's former regional commander, was last week moved from a
secret US-run detention site to Guantanamo Bay, where he awaits trial in the United
States. Indonesian authorities have heavily lobbied the US for access to the terror
suspect, who is wanted in Indonesia for terror-related crimes.
These arrests, deaths and what appears to be a doctrinal rethink among some JI
militants about the effectiveness of violent means to realize their stated goal of
creating an Islamic super-state in Southeast Asia have all taken a heavy toll on JI,
experts say. The philosophical divide inside JI appears to pitch the group's political
wing under the fiery Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Ba'ashir up against the pro-terror faction
led by Noordin.
Since his early release this year on conspiracy charges related to his role in the first
Bali bomb attacks, Ba'ashir has spoken out against further attacks in Indonesia, while
continuing to rail against the US and its allies, including public rants against Israel's
assault on Lebanon that were aired on some public television stations.
Ba'ashir, who for the past few years vehemently denied JI even existed, now wants to
"formalize" the organization into what he says would be a non-violent political group.
While many take Ba'ashir's statements with a grain of salt, Jones believes his
utterances may be directed as much at his own flock as the watchful Indonesian
authorities.
"There clearly is a significant segment of Jemaah Islamiya, including some of the top
leaders, who are in ideological disagreement with the notion that attacks on Western
targets on Indonesian soil are permissible," contended Jones. "And the line that
Ba'ashir has taken, whether or not he is sincere in it, is actually very much adopted
by other people: that it's fine to wage jihad when Muslims are directly under attack,
therefore it's fine in Palestine, it's fine in Iraq, or now in Lebanon. But in Indonesia, this
is not permissible."
Self-confessed terrorist
The most extreme ! example of this split and the man who seems to know more about
the inner workings of JI than anyone else - at least anyone who is willing to talk - is
Nasir Abas, the former leader of the group's "Mantiqi 3" regional division. His personal
story casts light on how JI grew from a recruitment guerrilla training group into a
pan-regional terrorist organization, and presages the philosophical divide that appears
to have recently opened inside the group.
Abas, a veteran of the US-backed campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan, rose
through the JI's ranks on the same battlefields that gave birth to Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda movement. At age 18, while US spooks were dressing up like Lawrence of
Arabia and cherry-picking the most radical of the jihadist groups to train against the
Soviet forces, Abas was recruited to fight in Afghanistan from Malaysia.
Training at Afghanistan's "Mujahideen Military Academy" from 1987 to 1993, he built a
reputation as a fierce fighte! r and capable trainer in guerrilla techniques, and was later
promoted to the position of instructor, he said in an interview. In the last year of his
schooling, his patron group Negara Islam Indonesia (NII) split and Jemaah Islamiya
was founded. Nasir said co-founders Ba'ashir and the late Abdullah Sungkar offered
him a job, telling him that if he stayed with Negara Islam Indonesia (NII), he would be
sent home before getting a chance to fight in the war for which he had trained.
Jemaah Islamiya gave him that chance. After Afghanistan, he helped start and run a
training camp in the southern Philippines, where he worked to recruit young Muslims
to the cause and spent time fighting alongside Moro guerrilla rebels in Mindanao from
1994-96. But by early 1999, he said, JI had changed, and Abas became aware that
senior group members, especially Mantiqi 1 division leader Hambali, were planning a
new kind of war.
"This idea started when Osama bin Laden issued a statement in early '99," Abas
said. "He said that now there is an obligation to all Muslims to kill civilians -
non-Muslims, Americans and their allies - in revenge for their actions against Muslim
populations." After 1999, some JI members, including Hambali, followed this
statement, he said.
"I didn't like this decision. Privately, I said to myself, 'This is not a fatwa, this is a
statement, because Osama bin Laden is not qualified to issue a fatwa,'" said Abas.
"The mujahideen were just fighting the [Russian] troops, they were only against the
people who were fighting them, oppressing them. They never disturbed the civilians or
killed women and children. This is what the Prophet Mohammed taught - only to use
force to defend yourself and your religion."
Significant fragmentation
Abas' concerns were realized after the group's first big attack, the 2000 Christmas
Eve bombings on Christian churches throughout Indonesia. Despite his doubts on the
group's new tactics against civilian populations, which he says he voiced to the
group's leadership, he stayed on with JI until well after the first Bali bombings. He
says he quit the organization in April 2003 and went underground as pressure on JI
intensified.
After being picked up in Indonesia in a terror dragnet and charged with immigration
offenses, he made the decision to inform on his fellow members, including his
brother-in-law Mukhlas, the Bali bomber now on death row.
Abas says that Ba'ashir, JI's former spiritual head, or amir, was never involved in the
day-to-day running of the group, and doubts he knew, or wanted to know, anything
about most of the attacks after the first Bali bombing. Ba'ashir was convicted of
conspiracy in the 2002 Bali bombing on March 3, 2005, in a Jakarta court but was
released this June.
Thereafter, Abas says, JI started to fragment significantly, with Hambali and Noordin
ignoring the previous Mantiqi regional command structure and stepping out
independently in organizing terror operations, even as other senior group members
expressed their reservations about the plans, which often entailed killing civilians.
Abas says Noordin has transformed his offshoot into a technologically savvy cell he
has dubbed "al-Qaeda in Indonesia", which uses the Internet to spread bomb-making
techniques and terror tactics to its followers. Noordin was first recruited to the group
in the early 1990s by Bali bomber Mukhlas, whom Noordin is still in sporadic contact
with and considers his spiritual mentor, says Abas.
This analysis was underlined by this year's arrest of a computer-science teacher in
Central Java and the seizure last month of a laptop computer from Mukhlas' fellow
death-row inmate Imam Samudra, who somehow got access to the device through
Indonesia's notoriously lax prison system.
Despite embarrassed Indonesian police claims to the contrary, it now seems that the
first batch of Bali bombers has been in contact with Noordin while in prison and may
have even helped him coordinate the second Bali attacks, where suicide bombers
were for the first time deployed in the terror plot. With Noordin still at large and his
demonstrated ability to plan attacks while on the move, JI may be down but definitely
is not entirely out.
"If you're looking at the weakening of JI, there's no question that's happened," said
Jones of the International Crisis Group. "But I think that Noordin and his supporters
are also making many efforts to reconsolidate in ways that we aren't entirely aware of,
largely through preaching and religious outreach. I think we should be aware of the
possibility there could be new groups emerging that we have never even heard of."
Chris Holm is a Jakarta-based journalist and editor.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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