Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (22 page)

This is the first evidence that JI and Al Qaeda were seriously considering joint operations. As it turns out, this plan was aborted and a more far-ranging plan of action against the American and Israeli embassies and the Australian high commission in Singapore was soon in the offing. But that, too, failed to hatch, when Singapore authorities found out about the plot and closed in.

In December 1999 and January 2000, Mohammed reportedly asked Hambali to accommodate Al Qaeda operatives passing through Kuala Lumpur. The operatives included Tawfik bin Attash, who later helped bomb the USS
Cole,
and future 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khaled al Midhar. Hambali arranged for their accommodation at Yazid Sufaat’s condominium in Kuala Lumpur and helped purchase airline tickets for their onward travel.
⁸
There is no evidence that JI was actively involved in either Qaeda action other than providing an apartment of convenience.

Sometime in mid-2000, Iman Samudra, the 2002 Bali bombing field commander, and Sufaat informed Hambali that Zacharias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent, had shown up in Malaysia unannounced, sent either by Abu Hafs or Mohammed. Hambali, who was in Indonesia at the time, returned to Malaysia to discover that Moussaoui’s purpose was to enroll in flight school. According to testimony entered at Moussaoui’s trial in U.S. Federal District Court in Virginia in 2006:

Hambali decried Moussaoui as very troubled, not right in the head…. Hambali put Moussaoui up in Yazid [Sufaat]’s condominium, which was often used to house guests…. Moussaoui had not come to Asia specifically to meet with Hambali, but because Moussaoui had been sent by Abu Hafs or KSM, Hambali and his fellow guest members believed it was their obligation to assist him.
⁹

Hambali, Yazid, Samudra, and Mukhlas became unsettled at Moussaoui’s erratic behavior, including a bizarre request for forty tons of ammonium nitrate with no clear target in mind. Ammonium nitrate is a volatile industrial fertilizer favored as a readily available explosive by terrorists, including Timothy McVeigh, whose 1995 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City registered as the deadliest terrorist event in the U.S history before 9/11. Moussaoui’s JI hosts decided to buy only four tons and a plane ticket for Moussaoui. The unstable Frenchman apparently didn’t even notice the amount bought and left Malaysia complaining that JI should stop reading the Koran and starting planning attacks. In the end, his JI hosts were stuck with the ammonium nitrate and the bill. When they later asked Mohammed what to do with the chemicals, he denied ever asking Moussaoui to request ammonium nitrate, let alone forty tons of it. After Moussaoui left, Mukhlas went to Pakistan to complain directly to Mohammed: “Sheikh Mohammed agreed that there was something wrong with Moussaoui,” but Bin Laden liked him for some reason, and Mohammed reimbursed JI for the plane ticket and ammonium nitrate.
¹⁰

Not until Hambali fled to Afghanistan to escape arrest for the 2000 Christmas Eve bombings in Indonesia did he and Mohammed establish a close working relationship. Over the previous eighteen months, Hambali may have been acting primarily as point man for Zulkarnaen, just as Mohammed may have been acting as point man for Qaeda military chief Abu Hafs al-Masri. The crucial and formative JI-Qaeda relationship was probably military chief to military chief. Because the highly secretive and taciturn Zulkarnaen is still at large, and Abu Hafs was killed in Afghanistan in an American air strike in November 2001, the details of the relationship between the military leaders remain unknown. There is no evidence to support the widespread urban legend that Hambali was a member of Al Qaeda’s inner circle of advisers, or
shura.

DISCIPLESHIP, KINSHIP, AND SOCIAL NETWORKS

JI’s hierarchical structure had little relevance to the Bali bombing and other attacks initiated through the personalized networks associated with the Bali plotters. At the October 17, 2002, JI central command meeting shortly after the Bali bombing, there was no discussion of the bombing. Nasir Abas asked Zulkarnaen if he knew who had carried out the bombing. Zulkarnaen reportedly told Abas that it was “none of his business.”
¹¹
Mukhlas, married to Nasir Abas’s sister, eventually confessed his role in the plot to his brother-in-law. But Abas was clearly out of the loop in the Bali planning. And there is no evidence that JI’s then-emir Ba’asyir knew any operational details about what was going on.
¹²
During Ba’asyir’s various trials for sedition and aiding a terrorist conspiracy, even those JI operatives who turned state’s evidence either could not or refused to directly implicate Ba’asyir in the Bali plot.
¹³
The Bali plot and plots after spewed from a tangled web of discipleship, kinship and marriage, social networks of Afghan Alumni and other friends, and not really from any command-and-control organization. Consider:

At the dawn of the new millennium Abu Bakr Ba’asyir outlined his vision of promoting “Islamic communities”
(jemaah islamiyah)
through religious education in Islamic
pesantren
in a speech delivered to the First Indonesian Congress of Mujahedin:

In truth, the enemies of Islam have eradicated this spirit of jihad—the love for jihad and martyrdom—from the soul of the
ummah.
The enemies of Islam know that as long as the
ummah
no longer understands jihad and the zeal for martyrdom, they will be easily subjugated. For this reason, we must nurture both comprehension of, and zeal for, jihad, so that love for it, and for martyrdom, grow in the soul of the mujahedin: this is the most important task of Islamic social organizations in guiding and developing their members…. Religious boarding schools are the bulwark of Islam…. In order for a
pesantren
to be truly a crucible for the formation of cadres of mujahedin … instruction in the laws of jihad and war must also be included in the curriculum, so that graduates of
pesantren
truly become preachers and mujahedin.
¹⁴

Sixteen of the twenty-six Bali attackers and planners either attended or were associated with one of three JI-linked radical madrassahs:
¹⁵
Al Mukmin, Lukman Al Hakiem, and Al Islam. These JI-linked radical madrassahs are both production sites and service centers for jihadis. For example, association with Lukman Al Hakiem—JI’s main Malaysian madrassah, which no longer exists—increases the probability by nearly 25 percent that a jihadi will play a major role in an attack.
¹⁶
After the 2002 Bali operation, most of those who helped hide one of the bombers, Ali Imron, were associated with Al Islam, where he was a teacher.
¹⁷

Within JI there has been a debate over whether attacks are legitimate on Indonesian soil and, if so, whether the killing of Muslims is allowed because they are
thogut:
violators of Islamic law and therefore
kafir
¹⁸
(although
thogut
is not always equated with
kafir,
most JI people interviewed consider them as such). JI-affiliated madrassahs usually accommodate all sides of the debate. Although only a minority of their teachers and students may support both attacks on Indonesian soil and the killing of Muslims as well as foreigners for the sake of jihad, the more “moderate” majority generally wouldn’t think of turning out the “radicals,” much less denouncing them to police. Still, the number of madrassahs that accommodate Takfiri ideology is small. Out of some thirty thousand religious schools in Indonesia, only about fifty,
¹⁹
far less than 1 percent, preach extremist views (about the same percentage as in Pakistan, as we’ll see in chapter 14), such as agreement with the statement that “it is the duty of Muslims to fight and kill non-Muslims,” as we put it to the students at Al Islam in one questionnaire.
²⁰

The 2002 Bali operation is not unique in its reliance on schoolteachers and friends from a few radical schools. Noordin’s networks have also depended on these sorts of ties, which cement personal relationships and ideological commitment. For example, in the lead-up to the Australian embassy bombing, an instructor at the JI-affiliated Mahad Aly school in Solo introduced three students to Noordin. One of them, Deni, became Azhari’s apprentice and took over as Noordin’s chief bomb maker after Azhari was killed. Two others, Urwah and Ubeid, brought in a fourth friend from the school, Aslam (aka Parmin), to help Noordin formulate his statement of mission. The tract, titled
Sowing Jihad, Reaping Terror,
elaborated on how Bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa for international jihad should be applied in Southeast Asia.

Urwah and Ubeid, together with Ubeid’s brother, also helped coordinate training and logistics for the embassy bombing. Urwah and Ubeid were arrested in 2004 and released in 2007. A short while later, Ba’asyir presided over Urwah’s wedding to a madrassah student. Ubeid joined the governing council of Ba’asyir’s new organization, Jamaah Ansharut Tauhid. By early 2008, Urwah and Ubeid were back together connecting up with their jihadi brethren. Urwah helped Noordin enlist key participants for the hotel bombings and the abortive plot to kill President Yudhoyono, and he was killed with Noordin. (Ubeid hooked up with Dulmatin’s project described in chapter 3.)
²¹

The lead-up to the 2009 Jakarta hotel bombings illustrates the interplay of camaraderie and friendship, kinship and marriage, school ties and discipleship. One of the principal components of Noordin’s support network was a group from Cilacap in Central Java. In 1999, Urwah was a teacher in the JI subdivision centered on Cilacap, part of the Central Java division of Mantiqi 2. It was the job of the subdivision teacher to team up with its preacher to form study circles that focused on religious propaganda, education, and jihad. From such study groups emerged many of the JI foot soldiers who fought Christians in Ambon and Sulawesi.

Around the time that Noordin brought Urwah into his circle, just before the 2004 Australian embassy bombing, Urwah likely connected Noordin to the former
da’i
from Cilacap, Baradin (Baharudin Latif), and to Baradin’s nephew, Sabit (Saeffudin Zuhri), an herbal healer who was one of the Afghan Alumni and an early member of JI. By 2005, Sabit was Noordin’s point man in trying to influence an informal Islamic study group in Sumatra to blow up Western tourists. (The plot ultimately failed in November 2007, when the group’s would-be suicide bomber got cold feet after Muslim women walked into the chosen target, the Café Bedu-del in the West Sumatran hill city of Bukittingi.) In 2006, Noordin married his third wife, Arina, Sabit’s first cousin, Baradin’s daughter. In June 2009, Sabit was arrested but Baradin escaped (he was arrested in December 2009). Arina’s father, who headed a JI-affiliated boarding school, had stashed explosives in his back garden with the aid of another teacher at the school. And this may have prompted Noordin to launch the hotel attacks ahead of a planned truck bombing of the Indonesian president’s residence.

Four of the principal actors in the 2009 hotels plot and its planned follow-ups were part of one village family: Syaifudin Jaelani, an herbal healer and Yemeni-trained imam of a local mosque, chose the suicide bombers. Amir Ibrahim, married to Jaelani’s sister, booked room 1808 in the Marriott Hotel where the suicide bombers stayed. It was he who told police about the plot against President Yudhoyono. Ibrohim, married to another of Jaelani’s sisters, was the hotel florist who smuggled in the bombs. Jaelani’s older brother, Mohamad Sjahir, was a technician who had infiltrated Garuda, Indonesia’s national airline.

Indonesia’s counterterrorism success has relied on cracking extremist networks by grasping their social structure, and moving against likely players in that social structure. Close ties of kinship and marriage, friendship and discipleship, have made penetrating these networks very difficult, and sometimes key parts have continued to operate right under the nose of security forces. But increasing success has depended on closer scrutiny and exploitation of social connections, not in directly attacking or challenging ideas and values. Those ideas and values continue to circulate and diffuse freely, and their potential for bringing in new blood remains. The problem for the future is how to turn youth away from them, without violence or denial of liberty.

A few final observations on these networks: Although the bulk of JI considered Noordin to be outside of the JI mainstream, JI-affiliated schools, charities, and publishing houses and other religious networks provided a passive infrastructure that allowed Noordin’s networks to survive and thrive. Thus, when Sabit showed up at a JI-affiliated school in Sumatra to preach violence in support of international jihad, he was not turned away, even though the schoolmaster and his superiors in JI opposed the content. They housed him and allowed him to rant as he saw fit, an errant soul but one of their own—certainly not someone they would ever denounce to the police.

There are other pieces of passive infrastructure that have helped to sustain the violent extremists. Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group suggests that lack of modern healthcare in Indonesia has created a void filled by religious healers, like Sabit and Jaelani.
²²
As with the medicine men of the Old West, these healers often move about the countryside, and their relationships have provided additional pathways and opportunities for the growth of personalized militant networks.