The Jakarta Post, March 07, 2006
Women who marry terrorists and join the global jihad
Noor Huda Ismail, Barcelona
Last year, I was invited to a monthly discussion at Khatijah Mosque, one of the most
important mosques in Singapore. Half of the audience were women who worked as
religious teachers to provide religious counseling and rehabilitation for women
members of Jamaah Islamiyah (JI).
One of the teachers expressed concern that there had been minimal attention paid to
the role of women in the terrorist network. She was right. Our knowledge about
women involved in terrorist groups is limited.
But these days, after the arrest of five women on two separate occasions for
smuggling bomb detonators and explosive materials from Malaysia into Indonesia
recently, the Indonesian police are gaining a better understanding.
"Our investigations into these two cases show that terrorist groups are likely to be
using women to assist them," National Police spokesmen Brig. Gen. Anton Bachrul
Alam said as quoted by The Jakarta Post (Feb. 20, 2006)
One of the most common ways that women have come to join the group is through
marriage. Sometimes they marry jihadists to provide support at home, and sometimes
they marry and work alongside their husbands in perpetrating acts of terrorism.
The classic example would be Hambali, who married Noralwizah Lee Abdullah, a
daughter of a Chinese mother and Malay father who converted to Islam from
Buddhism. Like her husband, Lee, would eventually also be known by several aliases
such as Acang, Lee Yen Lan and Awi, and was actively involved in recruiting women
to join the group.
The pair met in the early 1990s in a gathering held by one of the small women's corps
under the auspices of the JI founder. My interviews with one of the lecturers and
counselors revealed that one of the topics of the lecture was "Women and Jihad".
Lee was arrested together with her husband in a one-bedroom flat in the six-story
Boon Yarak Apartment in Ayutthaya, Thailand in August 2003, shortly after the
Jakarta's JW Marriott Hotel bomb attack.
Next on the list would be Omar al-Faruq, an al-Qaeda representative in Southeast
Asia who married Mira Agustina, the daughter of Haris Fadillah, a hardcore Darul
Islam militia leader who fought in Ambon and died there. In this case, it was an
arranged marriage between a jihadist and a daughter of a jihadist.
A Spanish security analyst in Barcelona told me that Parlindungan Siregar, an
Indonesian national who studied in Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1987, had
gone to Poso to organize military training. To boost the chance of his operation
succeeding, Siregar married the daughter of Indonesian Afghanistan alumni, Omar
Bandon. Siregar is a friend of Abu Dahdah, the head of the al-Qaeda network in Spain.
In his book The Second Front, Ken Conboy cited in detail a National Intelligence
Agency (BIN) report that a Melbourne resident, Jack Terrence Thomas alias Jihad
Thomas alias Abu Khair Ismail, married the daughter of a retired Indonesian police
officer in Makassar. Australian authorities believed that Thomas had traveled to
Kandahar as a paramilitary instructor in mid-2001.
The fact that he married the daughter of a police officer enhanced his connections.
The carnage brought by the group in the Marriott Hotel was partly linked to Noordin
Moh. Top's and Dr. Azhari's scheme to capitalize on marriage linkages.
Azhari's wife was from Bengkulu, where the suicide bomber, Asmar Latin Sani hailed
from. Noordin married a girl from Riau, whose brother Muhammad Rais was a JI
member who was arrested by the Indonesian police just a couple of months before the
hotel attack. The skinny Sani and the stoic Rais were cohorts in Ngruki Islamic
boarding school.
During a break in his operation, Noordin laid low while sketching new targets.
Surprisingly in that period, he married his second wife, Munfiatun Al Fitri, in a
marriage arranged by JI members in Surabaya in 2004.
Munfiatun is far from the stereotype of an uneducated woman. She graduated from the
School of Agriculture at Brawijawa University in Malang, East Java and taught Arabic
at Miftahul Huda Islamic boarding school in Subang, West Java.
One may be curious about whether there is any example of women's role in jihad in
the history of Islam.
Indeed, from the time of the Prophet Muhammad who fought Quraish infidels, women's
participation in jihad was cited in a brief treatise Manaqib al Sahabiyat (The merits of
the women companions of the Prophet Muhammad). The treatise was written by 13th
century Muslim moralist Abd al Ghani bin Abd al Wahid al Maqdisi.
Al Ghani wrote that Nusayba, a daughter of Ka'b who is also known as Um Umara, is
said to have gone out to help the wounded during the Battle of Uhud (626 AD), which
was the Prophet's major defeat. Nusayba then took up the sword and sustained 12
wounds. She was quoted as saying that there were four women fighters with her,
including one who was pregnant.
In the same manner, modern feminist, Aliyya Mustafa Mubarok, wrote in her
collection, Sahabiyat Mujahidat (The fighters of women companions of the Prophet
Muhammad), gathered a list of 67 women, who according to her, fought in the wars of
the Prophet or immediately afterward in the great Islamic conquest.
But those women fought under the legal order from authorized religious figures, such
as the Prophet Muhammad himself or caliphates, against foreign occupation of their
countries.
I wonder today what the justification is in Indonesia since the country is not under any
threat or foreign occupation. For the Koran says (5:87): "Do not transgress: Truly God
does not love the transgressor". And the Prophet Muhammad said: "By Him in whose
Hand in my life, none of you believes until he (or she) loves for their neighbors what
they love for themselves".
It is only by distorting and abandoning Islam's true teachings that anyone can justify
killing innocent people. Moreover, there is a very clear picture in front of us that
Muslims are the biggest victims of these attacks. In fact Muslims kill Muslims.
In a lush paddy field in Cigarung village West Java in mid 2005, the son of Heri Golun,
who blew himself up during the attack in front of the Australian Embassy in 2004,
cuddled me. He was a sweet baby boy. I can't imagine what his mother is going to tell
him in the future about his father.
What a poor woman, trapped in this kind of fatal marriage.
Noor Huda Ismail earned a British Chevening scholarship and is now in the
postgraduate program in International Security Studies at St. Andrews University. He
can be reached at noorhudaismail@yahoo.com
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