Far Eastern Economic Review, Issue cover-dated July 22, 2004
TERRORISM
Across Borders
A new generation of terrorists is training in the Philippines, and travelling, a new report
says
By John McBeth/JAKARTA
LAST SEPTEMBER, Malaysian police intercepted a boat off the coast of Sabah and
detained six of the 30 people aboard. Among them was Indonesian engineer Zulkifli, a
member of the central command of the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) terrorist network.
Investigators later determined that he was returning home from Mindanao in the
southern Philippines to be installed as head of Mantiqi III, the JI operational area
covering Mindanao, Sabah and Sulawesi.
Early last month, a 12-man JI assassination squad infiltrated into Indonesia's East
Kalimantan province after crossing the Sulu Sea from Mindanao. One man believed to
be a member of the squad was captured along with five other suspected JI militants
outside the Central Java city of Solo on June 30. Among those in custody is
Mustaqim, an explosives expert and a 1998 graduate of the JI military academy at
Camp Hudaibiyah in Muslim-dominated western Mindanao.
Ten years after the arrangement was established, a new report by the International
Crisis Group (ICG) provides the clearest picture yet that the Philippines' secessionist
Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) continues to facilitate the military training of a
new generation of Indonesian militants like Zulkifli and Mustaqim.
The ICG's Southeast Asia director, Sidney Jones, an expert on terrorism in the region,
authored the report. She says that JI's training programme in Mindanao has been
"crucial" in producing operatives capable of filling the shoes of earlier graduates,
mainly veterans of fighting in Afghanistan, whose ranks were depleted by the arrests
of more than 200 militants in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand in the wake
of the 2002 Bali bombings.
The death in July last year of Salamat Hashim, the MILF's founding chairman,
appears to have fragmented the region's biggest rebel group, and the ICG report
questions whether JI and other like-minded jihadist groups have established their own
personal ties to individual MILF commanders without the knowledge of the new MILF
leadership.
New MILF chairman Al-Haj Murad has disavowed terrorism. But the U.S. government
has few doubts about Mindanao's front-line position in what the report characterizes
as the "growing entanglement of deeply rooted domestic insurgencies with the global
war on terrorism." A senior U.S. official says that the available evidence "underscores
the point that JI is truly a transnational group. It goes beyond training and sanctuary.
But I think there's a debate in the MILF over the wisdom of maintaining this
connection."
Clear evidence of the growing ties between Indonesian and Philippine jihadists came
with investigations into the attempted assassination of the Philippine ambassador to
Jakarta in 2000. Drawing on interrogation summaries and interviews, Jones believes
that about 300 Indonesians have been trained in Mindanao since the late 1990s, in an
area that is outside the control of the Philippine government. She puts the number
there now at between 25 and 35 and says new Indonesian recruits are still coming in.
JI first established a foothold in Mindanao in 1994, building on ties formed with the
MILF in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Personal relationships between Salamat Hashim
and JI leaders allowed the organization to set up Afghan-style training centres under
MILF protection close to the Maguindanao-Lanao del Sur provincial border, first at
Camp Abu Bakar and nearby Hudaibiyah before they were overrun by Philippine
troops in 2000-01, and now at Camp Jabal Quba.
Zulkifli, whose capture was made public in February this year, is a central figure in the
report. The ICG says he was the mastermind behind the bombings of two department
stores in Mindanao in March and April of 2002, which killed 15 people, and the March
and April 2003 blasts at Davao's international airport and seaport that together
claimed 38 lives. No one has been charged with the two Davao attacks, which were
believed to have been carried out with the help of the MILF and the extremist group
Abu Sayyaf.
Mustaqim also crops up at several points in the report. Like Zulkifli, he was among the
first 17 graduates from the JI military academy between 1998 and 2000, when it was
being run by an Afghan veteran, also called Mustaqim.
Now that both men are in custody, Indonesian and Malaysian investigators have a
better picture than ever before of why the Philippines remains what the ICG concludes
is "a country of convenience for 'lone wolf' operators and cells of various jihadist
organizations."
Copyright ©2004 Review Publishing Company Limited, Hong Kong. All rights
reserved.
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