The Shadow Over The Summit
As leaders meet, Southeast Asia gets serious about its terrorists
Despite the progress, JI remains a lethal and unpredictable force, officials say. Most of those arrested have been foot soldiers, and many of its key operatives--including the group's top bomb makers--remain at large. "They are patient, determined, regrouping and rebuilding their network," warns Prof. Zachary Abuza, author of Militant Islam in Southeast Asia.
Once in custody, JI's fanatics have proved surprisingly talkative. Their interrogations have led to a better understanding of the group's structure--and to alarm among some officials. The organization is bigger than previously thought, with "a deep bench" that may be able to quickly replace key leaders. The debriefings have also confirmed what officials long suspected: that JI's leadership and funding are closely entwined with those of bin Laden's organization. Many of its top members trained at al Qaeda's Afghan camps. And in the past year, officials say, much of JI's cash has come from al Qaeda, including $80,000 for the bombings in Bali and Jakarta. But JI's structure is so loose that much about it remains unknown. "We still don't know exactly what the cell structure is or whether we have really crippled them or not," says a senior counterterrorism official.
Equally troubling are revelations about ties between JI and like-minded Islamists across the region. JI's reputed spiritual leader Bashir leads the Mujahideen Council of Indonesia, an alliance of some 100 radical and militant groups. JI also has links to Abu Sayyaf, a Philippine group that purports to have an Islamist agenda but has descended into criminal gangs of kidnappers and thieves. JI instructors have given Abu Sayyaf groups training in weapons and tactics, say Philippine military sources.
Training camps. But it is JI's ties with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front that has officials most concerned. With as many as 12,000 guerrillas, the MILF is the region's largest insurgency, and it has waged a 25-year-long fight for an Islamic state in the southern Philippines. Until Philippine troops in 2000 overran its major training base, Camp Abu Bakar, the facility served as a kind of mini-Afghanistan, training militants from across Southeast Asia. JI and al Qaeda not only provided funds for MILF, but JI's Afghan veterans ran two of their own camps at Abu Bakar. Intelligence reports suggest that MILF and JI have now established smaller training camps in the region. The close ties prompted U.S. officials this month to warn MILF it may be cut out of $30 million in U.S. aid pledged as part of a peace pact between it and the Philippine government.
As it has worldwide, success for America's terrorist hunters has come through dogged detective work and close work with local authorities. In August, a joint CIA-Thai Police Special Branch team tracked down the region's most wanted man: Riduan Isamuddin, better known by his nom de guerre "Hambali." The Indonesian served as JI's operations chief, held a seat on al Qaeda's ruling council, and was tied to a half-dozen plots going back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Investigators traced the wily operative through his fake Spanish passport, first to a travel agent handling his visa renewal, then to a courier who met his bodyguard in a Bangkok mosque, and finally to Hambali himself at a safe house an hour away.
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