I WANT TO RUN THE UNITED STATES SENATE!!
Posted on 10/15/2002 4:15:26 PM PDT by knighthawk
The car bomb on Saturday night that ravaged the Sari Club on Bali's Kuta Beach, killing nearly 200 people at the last count, has brought international notoriety to Jemaah Islamiah, a regional terrorist group many suspect was behind the attack.
John Howard, the Australian prime minister, on Tuesday demanded that Jemaah Islamiah be listed as a terrorist organisation by the United Nations, a move that the US and the Philippines said they would support.
Jemaah Islamiah has often described as the south-east Asian ally of al-Qaeda. But as suspicions focus on the group, it remains unclear what role al-Qaeda might have played in the operation.
Security analysts say although Jemaah Islamiah has often acted independently of al-Qaeda, they have co-operated closely on such plots as a planned attack against western embassies in Singapore last December.
Surveillance tapes of the target embassies filmed by Jemaah Islamiah were found in an al-Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan by US forces, which helped foil the proposed plot to avenge the US attack against the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Regional officials believe that Jemaah Islamiah is spearheading an effort by al-Qaeda to form a "second terrorist front" in south-east Asia as the US prepares to mount an attack against Iraq. Jemaah Islamiah has allied with al-Qaeda in its quest to create a pan-regional Islamic union in south-east Asia, with ties formed through friendships made during the mujahideen war against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in the late 1980s.
Malaysia and Singapore have claimed that Jemaah Islamiah's spiritual leader is Abu Bakar Bashir, 65, an Indonesian cleric who has preached that Indonesia, Malaysia and the southern Philippines should be ruled by strict Islamic sharia law.
A graduate of Gontor, Indonesia's leading Islamic school, Mr Abu Bakar established his own school in Java in 1972 to educate what he hoped would be the future leaders of a pure Islamic state. But he soon ran foul of Suharto, Indonesia's secular-minded dictator.
He was charged with sedition in 1978 for being involved with Komando Jihad, which was fighting to set up an Islamic state in Indonesia. After his release in 1985, he went to Malaysia, where he joined other exiled Indonesian ulema, or preachers. They included a preacher, Riduan Isamuddin, better known by his pseudonym Hambali, who became the chief organiser for Jemaah Islamiah and the main contact with al-Qaeda.
The group conducted sermons in rural areas of central and southern Malaysia, where they recruited members who believed in the idea of a regional union of Islamic states. In the late 1980s, a core group travelled to Pakistan for religious studies and many went on to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet forces. Among those was Hambali, who became acquainted with several future al-Qaeda leaders.
In Malaysia, Jemaah Islamiah formed links with the Malaysia Mujahideen Group (KMM), established in the late 1980s as a militia to protect the fundamentalist Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS), the main opposition party, from a possible government crackdown. Some KMM members later went to join Muslim militants fighting Christians in Indonesia's Sulawesi province, according to Malaysian officials.
Jemaah Islamiah also established a separate network in Malaysia under its direct control, recruiting some 200 followers, according to Malaysian police.
In the late 1990s, Jemaah Islamiah followers received training in Afghanistan, then under Taliban rule, and others went to a military camp run by the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao, say Malaysian officials.
Jemaah Islamiah also established cells in Singapore and Java in the mid-1990s. It was then that the first evidence emerged of its links with al-Qaeda.
With the fall of Suharto in 1998, Mr Abu Bakar returned to Indonesia, where he established the Indonesian Mujahideen Council to campaign for an Islamic state and resumed teaching at his religious school in Solo, Java.
Mr Abu Bakar repeatedly denies any involvement with Jemaah Islamiah and says reports of his involvement in terrorist activities are a pretext by local and western governments to crack down on the Islamic opposition.
Hambali remained in Malaysia and played host to two al-Qaeda hijackers involved in the September 11 attack on the Pentagon when they came to Kuala Lumpur in January 2000 to look at flight training schools. Another visitor was a suspect in the al-Qaeda attack against the USS Cole in Yemen, two years to the day before the Bali bombing.
Zacarias Moussaoui, the Algerian-born French citizen named as the 20th hijacker in the September 11 attack, visited Malaysia twice in late 2000, when Jemaah Islamiah arranged work documents so he could obtain a US visa.
The Jemaah Islamiah network began to unravel in May 2001, when Malaysian police cracked down on the KMM after it carried out a failed bank robbery in Kuala Lumpur. Evidence gathered at the homes of arrested members revealed links between Jemaah Islamiah and al-Qaeda. The arrests forced Hambali to flee Malaysia, probably to Indonesia.
Acting on tips from arrested KMM members, Malaysia and Singapore conducted a sweep against Jemaah Islamiah in December and more arrests have since been made. The Philippines has also arrested several people, including an explosives expert implicated in the planned Singapore attack.
Security analysts believe Hambali could have been the mastermind behind the Bali bombing. Abdul Razak Baginda, head of the Malaysian Strategic Research Centre, says the Bali attack fits into Jemaah Islamiah's strategy of fomenting ethnic conflict. "It's no coincidence that Bali was chosen because the island is mainly Hindu. We have already seen this happening in Sulawesi with the Christian population."
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