Tom Allard, Cilacap, Central Java
July 25, 2009 HE WAS a mystery visitor dismissed by Jasmin, until last week, as a curious oddity. Every so often, a man would turn up at his next-door neighbour's house, walking briskly up to the front door. "He would always wear a motorcycle helmet all the way up to the entrance. He wouldn't take it off until he got inside," says Jasmin, a small-time farmer reclining on a bench on his front porch.
"The first time I saw him was just after Arina had her first child. I didn't think much of it, but when they found the bomb we were scared. When we heard our neighbour was a terrorist we were even more scared."
Arina Rahman is the suspected wife of Noordin Mohamad Top, the Malaysian-born terrorist who has had a leading role in suicide bombings in Indonesia stretching back to the first bombings that killed 202 people on Bali's Kuta tourist strip in 2002.
The man in the helmet was almost certainly Noordin himself, visiting the woman with whom he had two children while on the run from the biggest manhunt in Indonesian history.
For more than six years, Noordin has evaded capture. His remarkable elusiveness has, it appears, allowed him to pull off another of his signature devastating attacks.
He is the prime suspect as the mastermind of last week's audacious and meticulously planned bombings of two of Jakarta's most prestigious, and supposedly well-secured, luxury hotels.
Nine people, including the suicide bombers, died at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels. Among those murdered were a Dutch couple holidaying at the Ritz-Carlton, Evert Mokodompis, an Indonesian waiter whose wife gave birth to their son the day after he died, and three Australians and a New Zealander attending a breakfast meeting of Jakarta's business elite that was almost certainly targeted.
If all had gone to plan, the attacks would have caused far more carnage. Police now believe that an undetonated bomb, a laptop packed with explosives and bolts discovered in Room 1808 in the Marriott, was supposed to have gone off first, provoking a stampede of panicked guests towards the lobby, where the suicide bomber was to have then unleashed two bombs in the chaos.
The merciless killing of as many civilians as possible is the trademark of Noordin, an accountancy graduate who gravitated to a brand of violent Islamic extremism in Malaysia under the influence of the then exiled heads of Jemaah Islamiah, Indonesian clerics Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir.
He fled to Indonesia in the wake of a crackdown on militants in Malaysia after the September 11 attacks.
He idolised Mukhlas, the now executed ringleader behind the first Bali bombings, and was infatuated with Osama bin Laden's jihad.
When Jemaah Islamiah's leadership, many of whom were appalled by the outcome of the first Bali bombing, decided to oppose mass-casualty attacks, Noordin struck out on his own and formed Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad, also known as al-Qaeda for the Malay Archipelago.
"The extent of his actual communication with al-Qaeda is not clear, but he certainly seems infatuated, aping not only its name but also its materials and tactics," says Sidney Jones, the Jakarta-based terrorism analyst for the International Crisis Group.
The recently retired head of Indonesia's Detachment 88 counter-terrorism squad, Surya Darma, believes al-Qaeda was involved in last week's attacks, pointing to their sophistication, similarities with the hotel attacks in Mumbai and the requirement for significant financing.
"This kind of operation is not a domestic kind of work," Brigadier-General Darma told The Age. "This is al-Qaeda."
Whether al-Qaeda provided more than just an inspiration for the July 17 attacks remains to be seen. What is certain though, is that Indonesia has never quite seen terrorist attacks of this type before.
Most bombings in Indonesia have either focused on so-called soft targets such as Bali's bars or restaurants, with suicide bombers carrying bomb-laden packs, or used the brutal but somewhat ineffective strategy of hitting hard targets such as the Australian embassy with speeding car bombs.
In this case, the target was hard, the famously tightly secured hotels in Jakarta's upmarket business district, but the method was to use suicide bombers detonating themselves, which had, until last week, been used only for soft targets.
This was a surgical strike against foreigners and, specifically, Jakarta's elite expatriate community. The modus operandi meant that the terrorists could minimise the number of Muslim casualties and maximise the dead Westerners. Even militant Muslims baulk at the death of their fellow followers of Allah through terrorism.
Such an attack not only required recruits willing to kill themselves, but intimate knowledge of the hotel's security system. It needed intelligence on how to smuggle explosives past the metal detectors and about where and when the business meeting at which the Australians died was to be held, and an ability for the bombers to blend in with the guests at the five-star hotels.
It would have taken months of surveillance and the careful recruitment and placement of conspirators inside the hotel. In this case, it appears that a florist named Ibrahim, who had worked at the Ritz-Carlton for more than three years, was one of the insiders providing the valuable intelligence.
For Noordin — who constantly moves from one place to another, never staying anywhere for more than a few days — to have orchestrated the attacks while Indonesia's most wanted man was extraordinary.
"He must have nerves of steel to put up with it all … all the moving, all the close calls," says Greg Fealy, a former Office of National Assessments analyst now at the Australian National University. "But he endures it and he's continually planning new operations and putting together new cells."
While many Jemaah Islamiah members oppose his methods, they will still provide Noordin, reportedly a charismatic and persuasive man, with protection for a few days while he plans the next attack and opportunistically picks up new recruits as he travels.
In some cases he picks up mainstream Jemaah Islamiah members and persuades them to embrace terrorism. In another instance, he recruited individuals with a grievance against a local Christian minister converting Muslims and turned that sentiment into an all-embracing hatred of Westerners.
All the while, Noordin adheres to the strictest security arrangements. It is instructive that his wife, Arina, says she had no idea who he was, even though she was the daughter of one of his trusted operatives.
CERTAINLY, over a decade or more of jihadist activity of one type or another, Noordin has developed all the skills to put together an attack. He knows how to make bombs, source explosives, raise finances and persuade recruits to join his cause by using select passages of the Koran, arguing that Islam is under attack and must be defended at any cost and by any means.
And his ability to evade capture has enhanced his stature immeasurably.
As police investigate the mass murders at the hotels, it is in Cilacap, central Java, that they are concentrating much of their efforts. The residents of the district are hardly wealthy, but the web of villages connected by narrow roads and laneways, where locals tend rice paddies and small landholdings planted with cassava and shaded by coconut palms and banana trees, is a kind of lush Javanese rural idyll.
The homes are modest but well looked after, with many having neat hedges and patios adorned with bougainvillea. Very few women wear the hijab, and fewer still wear the chador or burqa favoured by Arina, Noordin's alleged wife.
It hardly feels like jihad central as school kids race their bikes and farmers take their produce to market.
Yet here, apparently, is Noordin's nest. Police have found a bomb identical to that used in the hotel blasts buried in the backyard of Arina's house in the village of Binangun. Her father, Baharudin, is on the run. A man alleged to have been a would-be suicide bomber trained by Noordin's group was picked up this week by police in Cilacap.
Saifuddin Zuhri, an Afghan jihad veteran and Noordin emissary who was arrested in Cilacap three weeks before the bombs went off, is believed to have been an important organiser in the long build-up to the attacks, making the seven-hour journey by train to Jakarta under the guise of having been given an all-expenses-paid scholarship to study Islam at a university there.
Jasmin, the neighbour, says Baharudin didn't interact with his neighbours. "He was at the house or the mosque. He didn't really talk with us at all, even though we have been neighbours for 20 years. We have really got to get rid of these people," he says. "They are very bad people if they did this terrorist bombing."
Jasmin's sentiments were widely shared in Cilacap, and reflect the broader sentiment across Indonesia about militant Islam.
In a country of 240 million people, it is a tiny minority of Indonesians who support mass-casualty terrorism, or are prepared to provide sanctuary for terrorists. Noordin's network of hardcore adherents is unlikely to be more than a few dozen people.
The broader JI movement that was so shockingly revealed by the first Bali bombings has all but ceased to exist, at least as a group that supports achieving an Islamic caliphate across South-East Asia by force of violence.
It has been crippled by arrests and fragmented by ideological disputes, and it is only Noordin's network that is considered to be an active exponent of terrorism, even if it continues to try to recruit from the old JI membership.
Even so, while 400 arrests of JI members shows Indonesia's success in cracking down on its terrorist wing, the fact that militant Islamic schools and preachers continue to go about their business unencumbered reveals a flaw in Indonesia's counter-terrorism strategy.
While they may not be pumping out suicide bombers and generally do not advocate the killing of civilians, they are producing graduates vulnerable to being taken the extra mile by recruiters such as Noordin.
More worryingly, members of the community seem to be prepared to provide sanctuary to mass murderers in the name of Islamic brotherhood, even if they don't approve of their actions. As Jakarta-based consultant James Van Zorge said this week: "Dangerous characters inside Jemaah Islamiah are treated with kid gloves, often with light jail sentences, and therefore given more opportunities to commit inhumane acts.
"At the same time, foreign nationals caught in minor violations of drug trafficking are left to rot in prison for the rest of their lives. Is vice a more heinous crime than cold-blooded murder?"
One of the most salient points about terrorists is perhaps the most obvious one, but one that is all too often ignored. Terrorist acts are conceived and executed to be brutal, shocking and inexplicable — in a word, terrifying — to convey an impression of a capability far greater than the actual power or support base of the organisation that undertakes them.
People are much more frightened by death that is sudden and violent than a demise that is more run-of-the-mill and less bloody. A tourist or visiting business person in Bali or Jakarta is still far more likely to meet misfortune through illness, a traffic accident or ordinary crime than to be caught up in a terrorist attack.
Yet given modern technology and relatively easy access to materials that can make bombs, it only requires 10 or so fanatics with a total lack of respect for human life and a preparedness to die to put together attacks such as those that occurred last week.
For Indonesia and its President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the bombings could not have happened at a more heartbreaking moment.
Basking in international praise for peaceful elections held eight days earlier, the country was being lauded for its efforts to combat Islamic extremism and the fact there had not been an attack in four years.
Indonesia's efforts to unify its often fractious ethnic groups and to make headway against the pernicious problem of corruption have also been acclaimed of late.
Its economy, for so long a basket case, has been the best performing in the region, shrugging off the global economic crisis to be on track to record growth of about 4 per cent this year.
Tourism was booming in Bali, which had just been voted the "world's best island" by the upmarket Travel + Leisure magazine.
IF THE presidential election proved anything, it was that Islamic groups held much less sway over the masses than at previous polls.
Now Indonesia runs the risk of the newfound confidence in its future being reversed as investment dries up and tourists stay away.
In this context, it is perhaps understandable that Yudhoyono, relishing the opportunity to continue the steady reforms in his newly won second term, lost his cool and launched an astonishing rant hours after the attacks that all but blamed his political rivals for the hotel bombings, accusing them of being "draculas and angels of death" intent on "destroying the peace and security of the nation".
In the days since Yudhoyono's address to the nation, police investigations have shown those accusations to be as implausible as they originally seemed.
And it may also be that the intent of the terrorists to sow fear has not had the impact that they intended.
Jakartans have defiantly continued about their business, visiting the malls that are so often mentioned as targets.
Bookings at hotels have not been hit as hard as might be expected under the circumstances.
According to the chairman of the Bali Tourism Board, Ngurah Wijaya, the cancellation rates on the tourist island where two previous attacks have occurred have been "less than 1 per cent" over the past week.
"There will be some effect from the bombings, but we believe there will be other ways to make sure there is a minimal cost," said Wijaya. "Governor Made Pastika has called on all Bali citizens to be vigilant on security.
"We know we are still the best island in the world."
Such optimism may be well placed. Unless, that is, another terrorist attack soon follows.
Tom Allard is Indonesia correspondent.
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