Terror groups pose new threat

2003-08-10 09:13

Jakarta - Indonesia's success at dismantling the terror cell that blew up two nightclubs on the island of Bali won the government widespread praise and raised hopes that the world's largest Muslim country would not be overcome by extremist violence.

Now a fresh attack in the heart of Jakarta has brought a stark reminder that the threat of Islamic militancy - which has plagued Indonesia since before independence half a century ago - is still around and taking on new, dangerous dimensions.

Jemaah Islamiyah - the al-Qaeda linked Southeast Asian terror network blamed for both attacks - is employing methods previously unheard of in Indonesia: a loose command structure, individual cells operating independently of each other and a willingness to commit suicide.

"They're so rapacious they don't care if their collateral damage is innocent Indonesian taxi drivers," said Ralph Boyce, the US ambassador to Indonesia, referring to the car bombing last Tuesday at Jakarta's JW Marriott Hotel that killed 10 people, including four cab drivers, and injured 150.

Suicide bomber

Officials say the Marriott attackers, like the perpetrators of the October 12 nightclub bombings on Bali that killed 202 people, made use of a suicide bomber, a mobile phone to detonate the explosives and exploding vehicles whose chassis numbers were scraped off to hide their identities.

The similarities between the Bali and Marriott attacks have led authorities to suspect that Jemaah Islamiyah - widely considered to be al-Qaeda's Southeast Asian branch - was responsible for both.

Lending credence to the possibility of al-Qaeda involvement in the Marriott blast was an unauthenticated claim of responsibility appearing on Friday in the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arab from an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist cell called the Abu Hafs el-Masri Brigades.

According to the paper, the Brigades called the attack "a strong slap in the face of America and its agents in Islamic Jakarta, which has been cursed by the dirty American and the bold and racist Australian presence".

Investigations into a series of bombings blamed on Jemaah Islamiyah have uncovered a network of terror far wider than previously imagined, with roots in bloody sectarian conflicts long ignored by Western governments.

Under threat

The investigations have also exposed links between Islamic militants in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore.

"Security in the region is under threat," Arturo Lomibao, the Philippine chief of intelligence, told The Associated Press on Friday.

Jemaah Islamiyah's alleged goal is to set up an Islamic state spanning Southeast Asia. The desire for Islamic rule is not new in secular Indonesia, where most Muslim practice a moderate form of the faith. A civil war was fought over the issue in the years preceding independence in 1945. Former dictator Suharto used Islamists as allies in bloody anti-communist purges, then turned on the radicals when they lost their political value.

Jemaah Islamiyah traces its roots to the Islamists who opposed Suharto. Many of them, including Jemaah Islamiyah's alleged spiritual leader, Abu Bakar Bashir, fled to Malaysia in the 1980s - then returned to Indonesia when Suharto fell in 1998.

Regional security officials say that Jemaah Islamiyah members received arms and bomb-making training at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and in camps run by Islamic rebels in the southern Philippines.

US targeted

More recently, however, Maluku and Poso - two Indonesian regions that witnessed bloody clashes between Muslims and Christians between 1999 and 2001 - replaced Afghanistan and the Philippines as the preferred militant training centres, officials say.

Now, an easing of tensions in Maluku and Poso has given way to another shift: the targeting of Westerners in Bali and Jakarta. The US-led war on terror, Washington's support for Israel and the war in Iraq are the most commonly mentioned motivations behind the latest wave of terror.

In the past, Islamic fighters were organised into well defined militias and rebel groups. Now, intelligence officials describe Jemaah Islamiyah as a loosely organised network of cells operating throughout Southeast Asia, usually with little knowledge of each other's activities. Only those at the highest echelon know what the whole organisation is doing.

Jemaah Islamiyah has forged links with other Southeast Asian militant groups such as Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines or Malaysia's Kampulan Militant Malaysia, regional officials say.

Jemaah Islamiyah's modus operandi has led many to suspect the group is taking its cues from abroad.

More attacks

It is the connection with al-Qaeda that has many people worried in Indonesia, which most experts agree still has a long way to go to crush terrorist networks despite some successes in the Bali probe - including a death sentence handed down on Thursday to Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, the first of three dozen suspects in the case to go on trial.

There are an estimated 3 000 Jemaah Islamiyah operatives in Southeast Asia, including 2 000 in Indonesia, 200 in Malaysia and 29 in Singapore, according to Andrew Tan, a security analyst at Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies.

Bashir, the 64-year-old cleric who is considered the group's spiritual leader, is currently on trial in Jakarta, accused in a series of church bombings on Christmas Eve 2000.

Still on the loose is the group's alleged operations chief, Riduan Isamuddin, alias Hambali, who's been called Osama bin Laden's point man in Southeast Asia. Another fugitive is bombmaking expert Fathur Rohman Al-Ghozi, who escaped from a Philippine jail last month.

Terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, author of a book on al-Qaida, said tracking down the Jemaah Islamiyah leaders is the key to weakening the group.

"As long as the leadership is alive," he said, "there will be more attacks."

- AP