Indonesian Cleric's Arrest Disrupts Radicalization in Southeast Asia

VOA

Brian Padden | Jakarta13 August 2010

Photo: AP

Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Bashir talks to journalists in Jakarta (file photo)

Radical Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Bashir was arrested August 9 after a months-long investigation into a terrorist group calling itself al-Qaida in Aceh. Analysts say his arrest was more significant than just the disruption of a terrorist plot. It demonstrated, they say, a new emphasis by Indonesian authorities on preventing radicalization and terrorist recruitment in Southeast Asia.

Radical Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Bashir was charged Wednesday with helping plan terrorist attacks in Indonesia. It is a crime that carries a maximum penalty of death. Police say he was involved in setting up a terrorist cell and militant training camp in Aceh Province that was plotting high-profile assassinations and attacks on foreigners in the capital.

Symbolic importance

But terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna with the Singapore-based Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies says Bashir's symbolic importance to the radical Islamic movement surpasses any operational role he may have played.

"Bashir remains a central figure in terrorism in Southeast Asia and globally," Gunaratna said. "He's the public face. He's the iconic figure when it comes to terrorism in Southeast Asia. There is no one who is more prominent than Abu Bakar Bashir in Southeast Asia."

Who is he?

The 71-year-old cleric is a co-founder and spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, the al-Qaida linked terrorist network. Its purpose is to establish an Islamic caliphate extending over the Muslim areas of south-east Asia.

Jemaah Islamiyah is blamed for a series of bombings that killed over 250 people in the last decade, including those on Bali in 2002 and 2005.

Bashir spent more than two years in prison for his involvement in the 2002 terrorist bombings on Bali that killed 202 people. The Indonesian Supreme Court threw out his conviction in 2006.

Bashir has denied any involvement in terrorism but he continues to speak out and founded a legal organization called Jama'ah Ansharut Tauhid or JAT that promotes the creation of an Islamic state in Indonesia. His arrest had been anticipated after several JAT members were arrested in May for allegedly funding terrorist activities in Aceh.

No mistakes

Security analyst Ken Conboy with Risk Management Advisory says police took its time collecting intelligence and evidence against Bashir so as not to repeat the mistakes they made the last time the arrested him.

"The government really blew the case against him," Conboy said. "They had him in prison. They couldn't make any of the bigger charges stick and even the charges they did eventually get, he was let free. So I think the government really stumbled the last time around and I am sure this time they were being very very methodical and making sure they had as tight as case as possible before they arrested him."

Bashir blames pressure from the United States and Australia for his arrest and some hardline Islamic organizations in Indonesia defend him as a victim of anti-Islamic forces.

Extensive influence

Gunaratna says Bashir's influence in radicalizing Muslims and recruiting terrorists extended throughout Southeast Asia. Malaysia recently arrested three suspected militants believed to have ties with the radical cleric.

And he says Bashir's arrest is a turning point for the region's war on terror. It shows that Indonesian authorities are now willing to go after ideological figures with significant public support that promote extremist causes.

"The president of Indonesia should be congratulated because previous presidents did not take the threat seriously," Gunaratna noted, "and certainly the government of Indonesia should send to prison not only those who are operational terrorists but ideological terrorists, people who write, who advocate and who support terrorism. And Abu Bakar Bashir belongs to all those categories."

But he says this new emphasis on cracking down on those propagating extremist messages is just beginning, and more must be done to prevent the radicalization of another generation of Muslims in Southeast Asia.

A Terrorist Mastermind Whose Luck Ran Out - NYTimes.com

Image by aulia.m via Flickr

By SETH MYDANS

BANGKOK — Over the past six years, Noordin Muhammad Top, considered to be the most violent Islamist militants in the region, had become an almost mythical figure among both those who sheltered him on the run and those who pursued him and finally killed him in Indonesia on Thursday.

While suspected of orchestrating the country’s main bombing attacks during those years, he repeatedly slipped away from capture, most recently in August when, after an all-night raid on a safe house, the police discovered they had killed the wrong man.

At a news conference on Thursday, the chief of the National Police, Bambang Hendarso Danuri, held up photographs of fingerprints that he said confirmed that this time, the man they had killed was Mr. Noordin.

Journalists joined the police in raising a cheer.

As the region’s main Islamist group, Jemaah Islamiyah, turned away from large-scale violence in recent years, and as its leading figures were killed or captured one after another, Mr. Noordin, 41, became the most wanted terrorism suspect and a symbol of violent jihad.

He made a name for himself as the most skilled, inventive and dangerous bomb maker in the country, and was suspected of planning bomb attacks on the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta in 2003, on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2004, in Bali in 2005 and at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta in July.

People who knew him and people who have studied his activities said Thursday that Mr. Noordin had a quiet magnetism that drew sympathizers to protect him, new recruits to join his splinter group and at least three women to marry and start families with him, giving him both cover and shelter.

“He was a quiet person, didn’t talk much, very pious,” said an Islamic clergyman, Abu Wildan, who knew him between 1993 and 2002 when he was a student and then the headmaster at Lukmanul Hakiem, an Islamic boarding school in Malaysia, where he was born.

“He prayed five times a day and was keen to look after and defend the Muslims’ rights,” Mr. Wildan said in a telephone interview. Mr. Noordin, who graduated from the University of Technology in Malaysia in 1991, taught computers, sociology and the Malay language at the boarding school, he said.

Mr. Noordin was also a networker, Mr. Wildan said, visiting friends who were sick and consulting with fellow teachers before making decisions at the boarding school.

The school preached the violent brand of jihad of Abu Bakar Bashir, the godfather of Jemaah Islamiyah, and Mr. Noordin embraced its radical version of Islam.

Like many other militants, he fled to Indonesia to evade a Malaysian crackdown on militants that followed the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

By this time he seemed to have matured into a more focused and ambitious man, according to Nasir Abas, a former Islamist leader who defected to the government in 2003 and who was for a time Mr. Noordin’s commander.

“He is very well-organized,” Mr. Abas said in a telephone interview. “He is very charismatic. He is articulate, he is very good in influencing people to join his cause, giving encouragement and motivation.

“That’s why he was good in recruiting his followers.”

But it was luck and circumstance that turned him into a leader, said Sidney Jones, an expert on terrorism with the International Crisis Group.

He did not set out be become a bomb maker but began working with explosives when another militant, who had been hiding them, said he no longer wanted to keep them, Ms. Jones said, speaking by telephone from Jakarta.

“It was only when he was forced into a decision about having explosives that he became a leader and turned into a bomb maker,” she said.

“And from that time on his status grew within the radical fringe of the extremist network,” she said. “It continued to grow with each act and with his ability to elude the police. And so it was largely through flukes and an astonishing run of good luck, rather than skill on his part.”

After breaking with Jemaah Islamiyah, Mr. Noordin founded a splinter group that, Ms. Jones wrote recently, “models itself, in terms of ideology, targets, and propaganda, after Al Qaeda. The question is whether he only imitates it or whether he has some structural affiliation.”

Mr. Noordin also made contacts and recruited supporters in a wide network that included Indonesia, Malaysia and the southern Philippines, according to Rohan Gunaratna, the head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

“He could preach a very radical version of Islam but could present it in a very, very simple way to attract students whom he managed to convince,” Mr. Gunaratna said in an interview.

Mr. Noordin’s death is a major victory for security forces, he said, but it will not mean an end to violence. “He leaves behind a significant network that will continue the fight.”

Sari Sudarsono contributed reporting from Singapore.

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Radical Cleric Bashir Claims CIA Staged Jakarta Bombings

Candra Malik

Radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir. (Photo: Adek Berry, AFP)

Radical Cleric Bashir Claims CIA Staged Jakarta Bombings

Solo. Hard-line Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir on Wednesday blamed the US Central Intelligence Agency for Friday’s bomb attacks on two hotels in Jakarta.

“It’s the CIA, just like in the Bali bombings. The CIA directed the Mujahideen who wanted to take ‘jihad’ action,” said Bashir, who now leads the Jemaah Ashorut Tauhid, an umbrella group for Islamic groups advocating Shariah law.

Bashir left the Indonesian Mujahideen Council (MMI) he had founded and chaired for years after disagreements with other leaders of the group and founded the Anshorut Tauhid in September, 2008.

In his first public comments following Friday’s blasts at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta, Bashir said the CIA aimed to arouse hate against Islam, to get Islamic preachers arrested and Islamic study groups disbanded.

However, Bashir clarified, “I am not a bomb expert. I know nothing about it.”

The elderly cleric also reiterated that the Jemaah Islamiyah — a group that authorities said he had led and was an Al Qaeda-linked regional terror network responsible for bomb attacks in the past few years — did not exist.

“It’s wrong to say that Jemaah Islamiyah has been fragmented into two groups, the first being the original group and the second being the Jemaah Anshorut Tauhid. As far as I know, Jemaah Islamiyah is just an Islamic study group in Egypt,” he said.

Just like in the Bali bombings in 2002, Bashir was convinced that jihad networks in the country did not have the capability to make sophisticated bombs.

“Up till now, my opinion is that whoever believes that Mukhlas was the one who designed the Bali bomb is truly an idiot. The Bali bomb was a CIA design,” he said, referring to one of the three men convicted of masterminding the Bali bomb attacks and executed by firing squad.

He said the same thing applied to Friday’s attacks. “I think it’s not that easy to go in an out from the hotel carrying a bomb, even if it was brought in piece by piece. So, I have my own reason in saying that it must be the CIA’s plan to discredit Islam,” he said.

“The CIA, the US and Australia will not win. They actually fear us. Let’s see. Al Qaeda is just a small group but it terrifies them.”

However, Bashir also said that he did not condone the bombings. Citing the Koran, he said a war must be preceded by a formal declaration. “If they just exploded a bomb without any declaration of war, then it is not in accordance with ‘shariah’ or Islamic rule. That’s my opinion  . . . so they [the Mujahideen] could be wrong in their action,” he said.

He added that even in a war, civilians, especially women and children, must not be killed. “Even if they are kafir, they cannot be murdered. If they get involved, even in thought, they must be killed,” he said.

He added that the Al-Mukmin Islamic Boarding School that he cofounded in Ngruki, Central Java, was not a source of terrorists.

Two of the key Bali bombers were alumni of the school, as was the suicide bomber in the 2003 Marriot bomb attack.