ABC AUSTRALIA, 03/10/2005
LATELINE
Young JI attracted to new extremist special forces, says expert
Reporter: Tony Jones
TONY JONES: We're joined now by the South-East Asian director of the International
Crisis Group, Dr Sidney Jones, widely acknowledged to be one of the best-informed
analysts of jihadist extremism in Indonesia and the region. Yesterday Dr Jones talked
about intelligence of what she called a "new super-secret special forces unit" being
put together by Islamist extremists and which is attracting very young people from
Jamaah Islamiah and other organisations. If that's true, who's behind it? Sidney
Jones, thanks for being here.
SIDNEY JONES, INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP: Thank you.
TONY JONES: Now, this does sound like a very worrying development. What's the
evidence for it, for this new group attracting these very young people?
SIDNEY JONES: We've had a number of different sources who have talked about this
organisation. We don't know yet whether it's a splinter of JI and there's actually been
a formal break with the organisation or whether it's a militant wing that's gone off on its
own, but either way from different sources who couldn't have communicated with one
another, we've learned that this organisation exists. The name of it is actually a word
that's been used by JI in the past to describe special forces unit, but this is different
from its usage before.
TONY JONES: Is this potentially a source, an ongoing source, of young people who
are prepared to kill themselves as suicide bombers?
SIDNEY JONES: I think that it's certainly the case that this unit seems to be directed
toward undertaking attacks that involve suicide bombing. It doesn't mean that this is
the only group that could recruit people for that purpose. I think it's important for your
viewers as well to look at the bombing that took place in central Sulawesi in May,
only a few months ago. There were no foreigners killed there, but 22 Indonesians were
killed, and they used bombs that were just TNT and nails. That was a group that
wasn't JI. We don't know exactly who was responsible, but suspicion points to a
group called Kompaq and Kompaq is another one of these off-shoots of Jemaah
Islamiah in some ways, that grew up in the Malaccas, in the fighting in Ambon. That
also could be a factor here in this bombing.
TONY JONES: What do you think is motivating these splinter groups? I mean, are
they now operating under a series of separate discrete leaderships or is it possible
that Dr Azahari and Noordin Top are in fact directing the activities of this clique of new
groups?
SIDNEY JONES: I don't think that Noordin and Azahari are directing a whole coalition
of organisations, but they've shown themselves capable of mobilising individuals for
specific operations. So in the case of the embassy, they had a couple of people from
East Java and the Jemaah Islamiah operation there. They asked one of the people
from East Java, "Who do you know who is a committed mujahid who might be willing
to find us recruits?" And they came up with the name of somebody who was in West
Java in a completely different organisation. That's how these things work, through
different personal networks. Who do you know who might come into the operation?
Who did they know who might come into the operation? So you can put together a
team that's actually outside any one organisation, but certainly, Noordin and Azahari
are critical to the success of those operations. It's Noordin who is the major
strategist. Azahari is not the mastermind, he is the technician.
TONY JONES: Are these networks becoming much more informal, so that it sounds
like from what you're saying, they're not connected to specific pesantren as they have
been in the past, Islamic boarding schools, but actually, as you say, a personal
series of network?
SIDNEY JONES: Often the networks that they go to, are linked in some ways, either
to schools or to shared experience in military training, for example, the people who
trained together in Mindanao or the people who trained together in the Malaccas or
central Sulawesi. They may also share affiliation with a particular school and the
schools can be one of a number of different places. One particular one to watch is a
school in Solo in Central Java called Universitas Anur, it's a higher education unit that
produced some of the people involved in the network for the embassy bombing.
TONY JONES: Do you have any idea - I mean, we understood right back to the first
Bali bombings that some very radical pesantren or other schools were producing
jihadists, almost at will, that they were coming out of these places virtually
brainwashed and ready to go. Is that actually still happening, or has there been some
attempt by the government to genuinely crack down on those places? I mean, it
seems strange to me, for example, that you can put your finger straightaway on one
particular place and yet the government doesn't seem to be able to do that.
SIDNEY JONES: The problem is that it's very difficult to point to criminal activity going
on in these schools. If there were activities that were in direct violation of Indonesian
law, then the government could move. I think they feel very reluctant to move against
places where, even if you went into the school and listened to the teachings, you
might not be able to come out convinced that you were seeing people in the process
of being indoctrinated to become suicide bombers. There is a process of recruitment,
there is a practised teaching that goes on where people are assigned to specific
schools after graduation, and as the directors of these schools say, we can't control
what our graduates do, and in fact it start as lot earlier, but it would be very difficult for
the Indonesian Government just to close the schools.
TONY JONES: And from what you're saying, the real training actually happens
offshore, as it were, quite often, or in one of the conflict zones, and specifically, I
suppose, a lot of this training has happened in southern Philippines?
SIDNEY JONES: Some of the training has happened in southern Philippines but a lot
of it is just home-grown. I would be surprised, for example, to learn that the suicide
bombers in this particular bombing were trained in the Philippines, 'cause you don't
want to expend valuable resources who've had that kind of training. You want to save
that for something larger or for a more significant role. The people who actually give
themselves up, or become martyrs in their view, are usually more expendable, often
they're poorer, although not always, and sometimes, they feel they've been made to
feel as though what they're doing is something extraordinary, that they've been
specially chosen, and this is reinforced to the point that it becomes a positive act of
religious faith in some ways to go and detonate that bomb.
TONY JONES: Does it seem to you that since three of these valuable assets were
expended in one series of bombings, where relatively few people were actually killed,
in spite of the horror of the whole thing, that there may in fact be a larger pool of many
more?
SIDNEY JONES: I think there are a couple of possibilities. I think that there are more,
and I think that the Prime Minister is right, that there will be more attacks. I think at
the same time that the organisations themselves and the infrastructure that they work
within has become much weaker than it was before. It doesn't mean that we're not
going to see an ongoing problem and the fact that an organisation like JI is weaker
doesn't mean that we've made a lot of progress in eradicating the problem of terrorism.
It just means that we have to look beyond JI per se.
TONY JONES: What is the evidence that there has genuinely been a real split in JI
and what caused it, assuming that it happened?
SIDNEY JONES: I think that the evidence comes from testimonies, and from
interviews that we've conducted. And in those interviews, people talk about how for a
number of reasons, they don't believe that bombing is an appropriate thing to do. They
believe, first of all, that to bomb Western targets on Indonesian soil is a
misinterpretation of jihad, because according to their understanding, jihad should only
take place when you are being attacked and you then retaliate against your attackers.
You have a defensive war against your attackers. And that clearly is not taking place
here. They also believe that it has resulted in serious damage to the organisation, and
that it's not an appropriate - it's no longer an appropriate thing to do. They would like
to see a long-term strategy of 20 or 30 years aimed at constructing an Islamic State
in Indonesia. But these bombers clearly have lost sight of the need to construct an
Islamic State and are putting all of their energies in going after western targets.
TONY JONES: If it's true that Azahari and Noordin Muhammad Top have effectively
set up their own military wing now, what are their aims if they differ so radically from
what JI wants?
SIDNEY JONES: Well, I think that it's important to see that it's not just those two,
that is, there are other people also who have a background in JI and among them I
would mention the head of JI's military operations, whom we believe to be part of the
same group. But their aim is to follow in some ways the al-Qaeda line, of going
against the United States and its allies in retaliation for the deaths that they have
caused in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Palestine and you can go on and on and on.
But it's avenging those deaths and it's weakening the superpower in the only way they
know how to fight. They see it very much as a war, and it's not clear when victory
would be achieved.
TONY JONES: The assessment of the Australian Prime Minister immediately after
the attacks was that these bombings are actually aimed at destabilising Indonesian
Government. It sounds like your analysis is rather different?
SIDNEY JONES: Yeah, I don't think it's at aimed at destabilising the Indonesian
Government. I don't think they think in those political kinds of terms. Nor do I think
that their aim is to undermine a democratic system per se. I think they very much see
the world in these black and white terms of us against them, Muslims against infidels,
that the infidels led by the United States as part of a Christian-Zionist conspiracy are
out to persecute and attack and eliminate Muslims around the world, and therefore,
we have to fight back.
TONY JONES: In that sense, it does sound like a Australians in Bali could easily be
identified as targets by these people? SIDNEY JONES: I don't think they select
people by nationality, though. I think probably the reason that Bali was chosen this
time round again is because after the last two bombings in Jakarta, it was mostly
Indonesian Muslims that died and at least in Bali you have a chance of getting a few
foreigners. I doubt very much whether they had the intention of going after Australians
per se.
TONY JONES: Just finally - do you think the links, maybe the ideology is similar to
al-Qaeda. Do you think the links are there? After all, many of these leaders actually
served in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden obviously became famous. Many of
them actually knew him, in fact. Hambali and Mukhlas and probably Azahari himself
would have all known, or very likely known Osama bin Laden.
SIDNEY JONES: Yeah, it's a question that we can't answer at this stage, but I don't
think we can say that these attacks needed al-Qaeda support. I think it's perfectly
possible for the ideology of al-Qaeda to be accepted without any further material or
financial or logistic support. This is something that they can do on their own.
TONY JONES: Alright. We thank you very much once again for taking the time to talk
to us tonight.
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