Group blamed for Marriott, Bali attacks poses new threats

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Even as a top Bali bomber awaits execution and Indonesia basks in world praise for firmly tackling terrorism, investigators say they are confronted with a network of terror far wider than previously imagined.

A devastating blast at the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta two days before the bomber's sentencing has reinforced a suspicion that Islamic militancy in the world's most populous Muslim country is taking on new, more dangerous dimensions.

Jemaah Islamiyah -- the al-Qaida linked Southeast Asian terror network blamed for both the Bali and Marriott attacks -- is employing methods previously unheard of in Indonesia: a loosely defined command structure, individual cells operating independently of each other and a willingness to commit suicide.

Investigations into bombings blamed on Jemaah Islamiyah have also exposed links between Islamic militants in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore.

Islamic militancy

"Security in the region is under threat," said Arturo Lomibao, the Philippine chief of intelligence.

There have been some successes in the investigation of the Oct. 12 nightclub bombings on Bali that killed 202 people, including a death sentence issued Thursday to Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, the first of three dozen suspects to go on trial.

Before the Marriott blast, progress against Jemaah Islamiyah had begun to ease fears that the country would succumb to extremist violence.

But Tuesday's bombing in Jakarta brought a stark reminder that Indonesia still has a long road ahead to crush Islamic militancy. And the battle is greatly complicated because Jemaah Islamiyah seems to be taking its cues from foreign terrorists far removed from Indonesia's traditionally moderate practice of Islam.

The Marriott attackers, like the perpetrators of the Oct. 12 nightclub bombings on Bali, made use of a suicide bomber, a mobile phone to detonate the explosives and exploding vehicles whose chassis numbers were scraped off to hide their identities.

The similarities between the Bali and Marriott attacks have led authorities to suspect that Jemaah Islamiyah -- widely considered to be al-Qaida's Southeast Asian branch -- was responsible for both.

Lending credence to the possibility of al-Qaida involvement in the Marriott blast was an unauthenticated claim of responsibility appearing Friday in the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arab from an al-Qaida-linked terrorist cell, the Abu Hafs el-Masri Brigades.

According to the paper, the Brigades called the attack "a strong slap in the face of America and its agents in Islamic Jakarta, which has been cursed by the dirty American and the bold and racist Australian presence."

Jemaah Islamiyah's alleged goal is to set up an Islamic state across Southeast Asia.

The desire for Islamic rule is not new in secular Indonesia. A civil war was fought over the issue in the years before independence in 1945. Former dictator Suharto used Islamists as allies in bloody anti-communist purges, then turned on the radicals when they lost their political value.

Jemaah Islamiyah traces its roots to the Islamists who opposed Suharto. Many of them, including Jemaah Islamiyah's alleged spiritual leader Abu Bakar Bashir, fled to Malaysia in the 1980s -- then returned to Indonesia when Suharto fell in 1998.

Regional security officials say that Jemaah Islamiyah members received arms and bomb-making training at Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and in camps run by Islamic rebels in the southern Philippines.

More recently, however, Maluku and Poso -- two Indonesian regions that witnessed bloody clashes between Muslims and Christians between 1999 and 2001 despite garnering little attention abroad -- replaced Afghanistan and the Philippines as the preferred militant training centers, officials say.

Now, an easing of tensions in Maluku and Poso has given way to the targeting of Westerners. The U.S.-led war on terror, Washington's support of Israel and the war in Iraq are the most commonly mentioned motivations behind the latest wave of terror.

Indonesians practice a particularly moderate form of Islam, often combining ancient tribal beliefs and animism in their daily rituals. In the past, Islamic fighters were organized into well defined militias and rebel groups, not the loose knit terror webs commonly seen today.

The new methods more closely resemble those used in Afghanistan and the Middle East than anything Indonesia has ever seen -- reinforcing the concern Indonesian terrorists will be more difficult to defeat than previously thought.

Intelligence officials describe Jemaah Islamiyah as a loosely organized network of cells operating throughout Southeast Asia, usually with little knowledge of each other's activities. Only those at the highest echelon know what the whole organization is doing.

Jemaah Islamiyah has forged links with other Southeast Asian militant groups as well, such as Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines or Malaysia's Kampulan Militant Malaysia, regional officials say.

There are an estimated 3,000 Jemaah Islamiyah operatives in Southeast Asia, including 2,000 in Indonesia, 200 in Malaysia and about 30 in Singapore, according to Andrew Tan, a security analyst at Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies.

Bashir, the 64-year-old cleric who is considered the group's spiritual leader, is now on trial in Jakarta, accused in a series of church bombings on Christmas Eve 2000.

Still on the loose is the group's alleged operations chief, Riduan Isamuddin, alias Hambali, who's been called bin Laden's point man in Southeast Asia.

Another fugitive is top bombmaking expert Fathur Rohman Al-Ghozi, who escaped from a Philippine jail last month.

"As long as the leadership is alive there will be more attacks," said terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, author of a book on al-Qaida.