More information is emerging about Jemaah Islamiyah -- the Pacific Rim terrorists and al Qaeda franchisees who bombed the Bali resort. This is a very dangerous group operating in a region ripe for exploitation by Islamic fanatics.
The International Crisis Group has issued a 60-page report outlining lots of details about JI's history and capabilities. From the summary on their site:
Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the South East Asian terrorist organisation based in Indonesia, remains active and dangerous, despite the mid-August 2003 arrest of Hambali, one of its top operatives.Though more than 200 men linked or suspected of links to it are now in custody in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, JI is far from destroyed. Indonesian police and their international counterparts have succeeded in seriously damaging the network, but the bombing of the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta on 5 August provided clear evidence that the organisation remains capable of planning and executing a major operation in a large urban centre.
The information emerging from the interrogation of JI suspects indicates that this is a bigger organisation than previously thought, with a depth of leadership that gives it a regenerative capacity. It has communication with and has received funding from al-Qaeda, but it is very much independent and takes most, if not all operational decisions locally.
The arrests of Hambali and others surely have weakened its ability to operate, and the Indonesian police and their international counterparts have made major progress in hunting down its members. But this is an organisation spread across a huge archipelago, whose members probably number in the thousands. No single individual is indispensable.
The one piece of good news is that there are some indications that internal dissent is building within JI. Members are said to be unhappy with recent choices of targets, including the Marriott hotel bombing that killed mostly Indonesian workers. There is disagreement about the appropriate focus for jihad and over the use of a practice known as fa’i – robbery of non-Muslims to support Islamic struggle. Internal dissent has destroyed more than one radical group, but in the short term, we are likely to see more JI attacks.
Article via ICG's CrisisWeb, including a download of the entire report.
Meanwhile, the Australian press has gotten access to JI's secret operations manual, which has apparently been used as a basis for investigating JI's activities and prosecuting terrorist suspects.
The manual, known in Indonesia by its acronym PUPJI (Pedoman Umum Perjuangan Jemaah Islamiah), contains a constitution, outlines the roles of office bearers and even goes into what to do when a quorum cannot be met during meetings of the leadership council.Posted by Alan at August 31, 2003 12:45 PMThe document gives the lie to the previously widely held belief that JI is a loose hodgepodge of fanatics. The manual shows the outlawed organisation is highly ordered, with specific guidelines for planning "operations", and rules for communication. It also highlights the importance of educating and training more extremists to ensure JI flourishes.
The 44-page manual does not give instructions on how to build bombs or how to assassinate. Rather, it provides guidelines on how to plan operations. It includes four pages of diagrams depicting the organisation's structure.
A JI witness in the Bali bombing trials recently testified that the manual, JI's most important document after the Koran, is held only by the heads of JI's four mantiqis, or regions.
via the Sydney Morning Herald