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Bali is an attractive target because it is a tourist destination that caters to Australian and American holidaymakers. It also has relatively lax security even though it has now been targeted repeatedly (before he was assassinated, another notorious Islamist militant, Noordin Top, had allegedly planned yet another Bali attack for 2009). According to journalist Kelly McEvers, the group wanted a target that would bring the greatest possible destruction to America and her allies. After considering an international school in Jakarta and an American-owned gold mine, the group settled on Bali, the island of indulgences—food, drink, sun, and sand.
The fact that the majority of the island’s inhabitants are Hindu and that alcohol was offered at all the possible targets minimized the chance of killing fellow Muslims. The purpose of the attack was to send the unequivocal message that Westerners were neither safe nor welcome in Indonesia.27 The $35,000 to fund the operation allegedly came from Al Qaeda via a wealthy businessman, Wan Min Wan Met, one of JI’s leaders in Malaysia.28
JI has also been credited with the 2003 attack against the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, the bombing outside the Australian embassy in 2004, the second bombing in Bali in October 2005, and the attack against the Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta in July 2009, which followed three years of relative inactivity.29 Al Qaeda allegedly footed the bill for these operations as well, and handed JI operative Hambali a $100,000 bonus for killing so many Westerners in them.
The geography of Indonesia plays a significant role in JI’s success and in the government’s failure to contain it. The country is the world’s largest archipelago, made up of more than 17,500 islands covering an area of 1,919,440 square kilometers. The remote islands and dense jungles are an ideal environment for terrorist groups to operate in and hide from the authorities. Indonesia is home to more than two hundred million Muslims. The isolation of the islands affords JI the sort of autonomy and maneuverability that few other terror groups enjoy. Indonesia is a weak state with porous borders that is rife with corruption.30 Its diverse population is also severely divided along religious and sectarian lines. These internecine conflicts provide fertile recruiting grounds to the organization in areas like Maluku and Sulawesi.31 JI played a critical role in the violence that killed more than 5,000 people in Maluku in 2004–05. Nevertheless, supporters of JI and many Islamists look upon the sectarian rioting as a conspiracy orchestrated by Western (and notably Israeli) powers.32
Many Indonesians do not believe that JI really exists.33 Even the Indonesian government did not officially recognize it as a terrorist organization until April 2008—eight years after its first major attacks and six years after the United States added JI to its terrorist watch list.34
TOWARD THE CREATION OF AN ISLAMIC STATE
The former spiritual head of JI, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, is a lanky, white-haired, wispy-bearded cleric who wears wire-rimmed glasses. His ancestry, like bin Laden’s, reaches back to the Hadramawt region of Yemen. Ba’asyir began by fighting the rule of Indonesian dictator Suharto, who ruled the country from 1967 until 1998; Ba’asyir was designated an Amnesty International “prisoner of conscience.” Ba’asyir brought together the university-based student movements that opposed Suharto and the Islamic opposition.35 He founded several Islamic religious boarding schools, known as pesantren,36 the Southeast-Asian equivalent of the madrassas of the Middle East. He modeled his principal seminary, the Pesantren Al Mukmin, on his own alma mater, the Gontor Pesantren in East Java, which had combined puritanical Islamic doctrine with a rigorous modern curriculum. The school itself was located on the outskirts of the city of Solo in Central Java, behind imposing wrought-iron gates and surrounded by green rice paddies. Together with Abdullah Sungkar (Paridah’s father’s mentor), Ba’asyir also founded the Pondok Pesantren in Ngruki, Solo, in 1972. This school has yielded more jihadis than any one madrassa in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
Arrested and jailed in 1980, both Sungkar and Ba’asyir were eventually released on appeal. They resumed teaching at Al Mukmin school and handpicked their most promising students to establish small, self-sustaining communities, jemaah, in their villages. These Islamic jemaah would be governed by Shari’ah law and avoid association with any of the state’s secular institutions.37 Forced into exile in neighboring Malaysia in 1985, Ba’asyir and Sungkar literally went door-to-door preaching, spreading their interpretation of the word of God and creating a parallel movement of students and study groups. Finally, after Suharto was deposed in 1998, the two men returned to Indonesia to teach at the schools they had founded decades earlier and formalize their movement, the Jemaah Islamiya.
Sungkar designated himself the group’s first emir, or supreme leader. An imposing figure, in contrast to the rather bookish Ba’asyir, Sungkar required all members to swear a personal oath of allegiance, or bay’ah, in which they promised “to hear and obey to the best of my ability all things pertaining to the word of Allah and the way of the Prophet.”38
Sungkar and Ba’asyir organized the group into four regional brigades or mantiqi: Mantiqi 1 for Singapore and Malaysia, whose focus was fund-raising and religious indoctrination; Mantiqi 2 in Indonesia, for the promotion of jihad; Mantiqi 3 in the southern Philippines, Sulawesi, and Brunei, created in 1997 for training; and Mantiqi 4 in Australia and Papua, although it was never fully established as a separate administrative unit.39 When Sungkar died of a heart attack in 1999, Ba’asyir became the de facto head of the movement while Hambali became its operational chief.
In JI’s founding document, Pedoman Umum Perjuangan aj-Jama’ah Al Islamiyya (“The General Guidebook for the Jemaah Islamiya Struggle”), Ba’asyir advocated the creation of a sovereign Islamic state to bring together Muslims from Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Philippines, Cambodia, and Thailand.40 Since 1998 (or a bit later, according to some experts), JI has had the additional goal of cleansing the region of its non-Muslim elements, known as the uhud project; specifically, it aims to remove Christians and Hindus from those regions where they are demographically significant.
Ba’asyir was in and out of jail for treason, immigration violations, and providing false statements to the police as a result of his involvement in the Christmas Eve bomb attacks and the Bali bombings. In 2004 he was arrested again; the following year he was found guilty of conspiracy and served twenty-six months in prison on that charge. In 2008, after a dispute with Muhammed Iqbal Rahman (known as Abu Jibril), a rival and the leader of Majlis Mujahideen Indonesia (MMI), over whether the JI organization was really being run Islamically, Ba’asyir “left” both MMI and JI and founded Jemaah Anshorut Tauhid (JAT), “Partisans of the Oneness of God.”Although he officially severed his ties to the MMI and to JI’s core, Ba’asyir retained his affiliation with the Pesantren Al Mukmin. Several of the hard-liners followed him to JAT.
Even hard-core Islamists regard JI with a modicum of suspicion. They object to the clandestine nature of the organization and its practice of swearing oaths to the emir; for pure Salafists, it is appropriate to swear allegiance to the commander of the faithful but not to the head of a covert group. Most Muslims reject JI’s interpretation of jihad because its extremist wing sanctions suicide bombs and killing civilians.41
JI is similar to the Muslim Brotherhood, in the sense that it contains many divisions, some of which are involved in purely legal activities, while others engage in violent deeds and terrorism. The divisions that provide benevolent and humanitarian efforts bestow upon the organization a veneer of legitimacy. Nonetheless, JI is split between its mainstream and its extremists. Extremists like Hambali and Top are responsible for the suicide bombings, whereas the majority of the mainstream pursue the goal of an Islamic state but do not support the killing of civilians, especially other Indonesians or other Muslims.
For many hard-line Islamists (including some Salafists), suicide bombers and terrorists are considered muharibeen—people who cause harm and death—and their acts are punishable by death. Furthermore, JI’s goal of toppling the regime
is highly problematic because, according to Islamic tradition, the faithful are forbidden to rebel against elected Muslims leaders. In the Hadith (the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammed [PBUH]), the Prophet addresses the idea of consensus among his people and in several Hadith he is quoted as saying “My community will never agree in error.”42 If a rebellion against a Muslim leader has little chance of succeeding, or will lead to more bloodshed and tyranny than under the current leader, the theologians advise against it. Even Muhammed ‘Abd al Wahhab (the founder of the fundamentalist Wahhabi movement) argued against rebelling against Muslim governments.
He told the people of Al Qaseem, “It is obligatory to hear and obey the leaders of the Muslims, whether they are righteous or immoral, so long as they do not enjoin disobedience toward Allah. Whoever has become Caliph and the people have given him their support and accepted him, even if he has gained the position by force, is to be obeyed and it is haram [forbidden] to rebel against him.”43
Indonesian Muslims are not being ruled by nonbelievers or by foreign occupiers but by their own democratically elected Muslim representatives.
When Ba’asyir left MMI to start JAT, several JI members migrated with him, virtually dissolving the MMI organization in the process. The suicide bombings and attacks against Westerners are a manifestation of Noordin Top’s offshoot organization rather than of the mainstream of JI.44 This issue has caused division within JI and led to several members leaving the group and even working with counter-terrorism officials.45 While Top maintained close contacts with JAT and MMI through an operative, it is unclear whether Ba’asyir condoned or supported the suicide operations against Westerners in 2005 and 2009.
According to a notorious Western convert to the movement, Rabiah (Robyn) Hutchison, Ba’asyir is a mild-mannered and patient man who is much less dogmatic than several of his students. He disapproved of the freedom with which many of his students accused others of being takfir, meaning that they had strayed from the faith and become nonbelievers, just because they disagreed with JI’s mission and tactics. Al Qaeda has used the same term to justify its attacks against Muslims who work with American occupiers or even those who participate in democratic elections. Hutchison quotes Ba’asyir as saying: “If someone believes in Allah, even though they may be ignorant of many things in Islam, it is not the basis to say they are outside of Islam.”46 Hardly a moderate, Ba’asyir is also quoted as saying: “There is no nobler life than to die as a martyr for jihad. None. The highest deed in Islam is jihad. If we commit to jihad, we can neglect other deeds, even fasting and prayer.”47 Of bin Laden, Ba’asyir says that he supports his struggle because it is the true struggle to uphold Islam. Ba’asyir denies having any direct connection to bin Laden, but dreams of one day meeting him.48 For Ba’asyir, the real terrorists are America and Israel, and he advocates sending Indonesian mujahideen to Palestine to drive out the Israeli occupiers and demonstrate the Islamic nations’ resolute stance against Israel’s persecution of the Palestinian people.49
In 2003, JI faced disintegration as an organization when more than ninety of its leaders were arrested and a quarter of its leadership killed as part of the counter-terrorism campaign in the aftermath of the Bali attacks. So many Muslim civilians had been killed by JI attacks that a serious rift developed among the extremists, between those (like Imam Samudra) who advocated the killing of civilians and others (like Nasir bin Abas, Paridah’s older brother) who rejected it. Group members expressed serious opposition to the fratricidal nature of the attacks and were concerned that a handful of radicals had diluted JI’s core purpose—to combat corruption and address the socioeconomic needs of Indonesian Muslims.50 The Mantiqi 3 leader Nasir bin Abas broke with the organization and started working with government agencies to help deradicalize or at least demobilize his former colleagues.51
JI attracts its recruits from within four key societal institutions: kinship or family groups, mosques, pesantrens, and friendship networks. The mosques and pesantrens appear to be closely connected and highly effective in recruiting cadres. While the number of pesantrens in Indonesia has risen over the past few years, it should be emphasized that of the eighteen thousand schools teaching three million students, no more than one hundred and fifty are radicalized and only four have been directly linked with terrorist training and operations.52
Of the four recruitment mechanisms, kinship and friendship groups are the key for radical mobilization. Among their virtues, from the point of view of the jihadis, is that both methods are resistant to government infiltration. In addition, siblings working together can offer each other support during an operation. This increases operational efficacy and improves security.53 JI understood what the Chechen jihadis eventually learned: that brothers (and sisters) would be more loyal to each other and less likely to defect, change their mind, or disappoint one another than people who are not related. During the 2002 Bali bombing, Ali Ghufron54 involved both his younger and his older brother in the operation. Attacks involving teams of brothers or relatives are fairly common in JI.
Once people join JI, the group becomes an all-encompassing force that regulates every aspect of their social lives.55 Members socialize and marry within the group, and rarely associate with people outside it. In this context, kinship and friendship are two sides to the same coin, in the sense that when an individual is brought into JI by means of friendship, these ties are likely to be reinforced through marriage.56 Senior members of JI offer their sisters or sisters-in-law to new and promising recruits, so the individual is drawn both into the organization and into a family.57 The daughters and sisters of terror-cell leaders also intermarry with the leaders of other cells, creating bonds that ensure that no operative or leader defects or “walks away.”
Marriages have been arranged deliberately to forge links between Malaysian and Indonesian JI members. This network of marriages makes JI like an extended family.58 Sungkar himself married off his stepdaughters to Ferial Muchlis bin Abdul Halim, a head of the Selangor JI cell, and Syawal Yassin, a prominent South Sulawesi figure and former military trainer in Afghanistan.59 Ali Ghufron was married to Paridah, the younger sister of Nasir bin Abas, the head of JI’s Malaysian wing.60 Haris Fadillah, a Muslim militia leader, arranged for his daughter, Mira Augustina, to marry Omar Al Faruq, the Al Qaeda representative in Southeast Asia, in the course of one day. In many cases, senior JI figures arrange the marriages of their subordinates to their own sisters and sisters-inlaw to keep the network secure.
EXTREME MARRIAGE
Noralwizah Lee Binti Abdullah61 is the Sabahan Chinese wife of JI’s former operational commander, Hambali.62 Noralwizah’s father was Malay and her mother a Chinese convert to Islam. Born in 1970, Noralwizah grew up poor and her youth was plagued by her father’s alcoholism and philandering. To escape the pressures of home, she converted from Buddhism to Islam and headed to Lukmanul Hakiem Pesantren in Ulu Tiram, in the southern Malaysian state of Johor. The boarding school was a hotbed of radicalization and a hub of JI activity. All the major JI players crossed paths in the school in the early 1990s, including the organization’s founders, Ba’asyir and Sungkar, and Ali Ghufron and Noordin Top. Top became the school’s principal in 1994.
In 1990 Noralwizah joined Sungkar’s female corps, which the JI leader used to spread his radical message. The girls networked among Sungkar’s wives and offered lectures on the role of women in jihad to other women. When Noralwizah met Hambali at the school, he immediately proposed marriage, and they were wed in a simple ceremony in 1991.
Noralwizah wasn’t just Hambali’s wife: she was a full-fledged JI member. She shared his conservative religious outlook and agreed with him that jihad was a necessity rather than an option. She is believed to be a member of JI’s central command and one of its chief financial accountants.63 Noralwizah held the purse strings while also organizing activities for JI women members. She actively recruited women to form her network of friends and to provide potential wives for new male JI recruits.
/> Hambali used Noralwizah’s girlfriends to enlist and reward his best people. As men marry women within the network, the men become more fervent in their support, and less likely to disappoint their new families. In many cases, their in-laws provide the core link to the jihadis. In many cases, the women seem to be more radical than the men.64 Yazid Sufaat, who aided the 9/11 bombers and spearheaded Al Qaeda’s WMD program, for example, became more religious as a result of the influence of his wife, Sejarahtul Dursina.
At a monthly discussion at the Khadijah Mosque, one of the most active mosques in Singapore, half of the audience is made up of female religious teachers who counsel and help rehabilitate the families of JI detainees. One woman expressed concern that so little attention had been paid to understanding the role of women in the terrorist group. But some of the women know of and support their husbands’ activities through fund-raising, or by hiding their husbands or their husbands’ colleagues from the authorities. Several of the women (like Noralwizah) play a role in managing finances.
Women in the region have always been politically active, and have made great strides toward female emancipation, education, and political empowerment. Because JI is an Islamic group, people assume that the women take a backseat to the men, but this is hardly the case. The women form the strategic nexus that allows the organization to function throughout the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Southeast Asia generally. There are no Islamist movements in Southeast Asia today, be they moderate, progressive, fundamentalist, or militant, from which women are excluded.65 From the 1930s to the 1960s, many of Indonesia’s political parties recruited, trained, and armed women as active party members. Every single major Islamic political party in Indonesia and Malaysia, including Indonesia’s Prosperous Justice Party (the Partai Keadilan Sejahtera or PKS) and the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), has a women’s wing with thousands of active members.66