Bombshell (25 page)

With no headquarters, no main office, no public outreach, and no official spokesmen to represent it, it is a wonder that the group flourished as it did. JI's success depended on strong kinship, marital, and familial bonds. The women of JI ensure its survival by forging critical links between disparate and geographically isolated groups. Marriage alliances, in particular, serve as the glue that holds the organization together. Women also make a crucial contribution to JI's solvency by engaging in cottage industries, making and selling Islamic headscarves, marketing Islamic herbal remedies, and undertaking a variety of piecework at home.
¹¹
In many ways, JI operates like the Sicilian Mafia, using family connections and strategic marriages to make the organization cohere. It thus owes its success to the women, who form the links that reproduce both the ideology and the children for succeeding generations. JI is not a static terrorist organization but rather has evolved into a social
organization that engages in economic activities, public relations, and social outreach. The International Crisis Group asserts that the women of JI are also critical to its ability to evade arrest.
¹²

Al Qaeda is said to have commenced operations in Indonesia as early as 1988, when Osama bin Laden dispatched his brother-in-law, Muhammed Jamal Khalifa, to the Philippines to establish contacts with local militant groups throughout Southeast Asia. Unlike other affiliates all over the world that were directly controlled by Al Qaeda, however, JI functioned semiautonomously, pursuing its own local agenda. In addition to Al Qaeda, it associated with several other terrorist groups, including the Filipino organizations the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Abu Sayyaf, with whom JI members trained and shared tactics and safe houses.

The 9/11 Commission Report linked JI to the 1993 World Trade Center bombers and to mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammed (popularly known by his initials, KSM), who spent some of his formative years as a terrorist in the region before he was even a member of Al Qaeda. KSM hatched the preliminary plot for 9/11 in the Philippines with a plan, Operation Bojinka, to ram commercial airplanes into buildings.
¹³
In 1994, several key members of Operation Bojinka formed a front corporation called Konsonjaya, a trading company that supposedly exported Malaysian palm oil to Afghanistan and traded in Sudanese and Yemeni honey. All these countries were important nodes in Al Qaeda's global network. (Bin Laden actually resided in Sudan at the time, and ran several companies that exported these products.) As late as 1998, KSM still used Konsonjaya as a cover for his international travels. The names on its board of directors read like a who's who of the Al Qaeda network, with jihadis from Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Indonesia.
¹⁴

Over time, JI developed a closer association with Al Qaeda, sharing members and jointly planning operations. Riduan
Isamuddin, a.k.a. Hambali, was a member of both Al Qaeda and JI and provided the key link between KSM and the terrorist-cell leaders in Southeast Asia.
¹⁵
JI's leaders circulated bin Laden's speeches and writings. Many JI operatives were trained in Afghanistan and worked closely with the Afghan Arabs as part of the international brigade during their nine-year fight against the Soviets.
¹⁶
In the training camps, the new recruits pledged a
bay'ah
, a formal oath of loyalty, to bin Laden and to Al Qaeda.
¹⁷
As many as three hundred Indonesians “graduated” from the jihadi camps in Afghanistan.
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The two groups shared tactics and expertise and created a jointly operated training camp in Poso, on the coast of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

JI can also be linked to 9/11 more concretely. Yazid Sufaat, a former Malaysian army captain and microbiologist, was instrumental in aiding the 9/11 plotters. He hosted Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called twentieth hijacker) on his way to flight school in the United States.
Time
reported that Sufaat was a member of Jemaah Islamiya and that Moussaoui stayed at the Sufaat house several times, where they discussed Moussaoui's dream of crashing a plane into the White House.
¹⁹
Sufaat and his wife, Dursina, had both attended California State University in Sacramento in the 1980s and understood the ins and outs of entering the country with a foreign visa. When Moussaoui was arrested in the month before the attacks, he carried with him a letter of employment on letterhead from Sufaat's company, InFocus Tech, to legally sponsor his entry to the United States.
²⁰
The letters of introduction named Moussaoui as InFocus Tech's “marketing consultant” for the United States, Britain, and Europe. Sufaat had signed the letters as the company's managing director and provided Moussaoui with a $2,500 monthly stipend during his stay in the United States, along with a lump sum of $35,000 to get him started at the flight school.

FBI chief Robert Mueller singled out JI as Al Qaeda's principal
Southeast Asian partner. The organization received more than 1.35 billion rupiahs ($140,000) over three years from Al Qaeda, and still it remained off the radar screen until the Bali and Jakarta bombings. Even though several of JI's leaders were arrested in Singapore in 2002, many Americans only really became aware of Indonesia after it was struck by the tsunami in December 2004, and few understood anything about the terrorist movement there until it was too late.
²¹

By the beginning of the millennium, the group had bombed as many as thirty churches in Jakarta, West Java, North Sumatra, Riau, and Bandung, killing eighteen people in the process.
²²
In 2000, it perpetrated terror attacks throughout Indonesia, including a car bomb at the Jakarta Stock Exchange and Christmas Eve bombings in East Java and Nusatenggara. At 11:05
P.M.
on October 12, 2002, Paridah's husband, Ali Ghufron, masterminded the deadly explosions at Paddy's Irish Pub and the Sari Club across the street from Paddy's Pub in the Kuta district of Bali. “A Saturday night at two popular nightclubs ended with friends ripped to pieces and burned to death. Dozens, maybe hundreds, were dead, and an entire block of buildings was gone.”
²³
The carnage was “incomprehensible.”
²⁴
For terrorist leader Imam Samudra,
²⁵
echoing comparable statements by Osama bin Laden, the Australians, who were the majority of the casualties of the nightclub attacks, were suitable targets due to their country's efforts to separate East Timor from Indonesia.
²⁶
The attack comprised three separate blasts, a hallmark of Al Qaeda operations, intended to wreak the maximum carnage by killing people fleeing the scene as well as any first responders to the initial explosion. The same modus operandi was repeated in 2005 when Bali was bombed again.

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.
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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
,
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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.
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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.
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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.