Asia's terror groups down but not out

Asia's terror groups down but not out

Dan Eaton, Reuters, Jakarta

Working less like a corporation with branch offices and more like
mafia-style family groups, Islamic militant cells in Asia have
shown amazing resilience in the face of global efforts to
eliminate terror.

After almost two years of intelligence operations and hundreds
of arrests, Asian security forces still stand on high alert
against radicals determined to stage deadly attacks.

But the only certainty, say analysts and intelligence
operatives, is that someone, somewhere is planning attacks and
one will inevitably succeed.

"I believe there are new operations being planned and some of
them may be very severe indeed," said Ross Babbage, head of the
Strategic and Defence Studies Centre in Australia's capital,
Canberra.

Captured militants interrogated by security services have
already revealed much larger and less homogeneous networks than
previously thought -- many with only tenuous links and even more
disparate goals.

"We have made some progress, damaged some capabilities, but a
lot more progress is required before we can start relaxing," said
Babbage, a former senior Australian intelligence officer.

Huge progress has been made through hundreds of arrests and
enhanced cooperation between Asian security services, but the
hunt may also be feeding the violence.

Uday Bhaskar, a former Indian navy commodore now with the New
Delhi-based Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis, said some
dormant terror cells had been stirred into action since the
deadly attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

The attack on the United Nations' Iraq headquarters in
Baghdad, the blast at a U.S.-run hotel in Indonesia and bombings
in India's commercial hub, Mumbai (Bombay), were the most recent
examples of a pattern, he said.

"I say this with great regret, that this is a pattern that is
only going to increase or intensify in the next few months."

Despite last month's arrest of the man suspected of being one
of the kingpins of the shadowy Southeast Asian network known as
Jamaah Islamiyah (JI), analysts say the group remains active and
dangerous.

"The information emerging from the interrogation of JI
suspects is a bigger organization than previously thought, with a
depth of leadership," said Sidney Jones, Indonesia project
director for the International Crisis Group (ICG), in a recent
report.

Jamaah Islamiyah is believed by many experts to be the
regional arm of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, blamed for
the Sept. 11 attacks that precipitated the U.S.-led war in
Afghanistan and turned the spotlight on Asia.

In the past year, more than 200 people suspected of having
links with JI have been taken into custody in Indonesia,
Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.

But the Indonesian hotel bombing showed the group remained
dangerous despite many of its suspected operatives being detained
or jailed since last year's attack in Bali in which 202 people
were killed.

Asian authorities say that while JI has received funding and
training from al-Qaeda, the group has different goals and takes
major operational decisions independently.

"All... groups tend to be lumped together. Their motives can
be quite different," Uday Bhaskar said.

The Mumbai blasts, for example, have been blamed on the
Students Islamic Movement of India in conjunction with a
Pakistan-based Kashmiri separatist group, while the aim of the
Indonesian attacks was to bring about the downfall of the secular
government and the creation of a pan-regional Islamic State.

But the links exist.

The ICG report said JI was held together not just by ideology
and training, but also through a network of marriages -- a sort
of extended family with thousands of members.

The network relies heavily on a small circle of religious
boarding schools -- an "Ivy League" according to the ICG -- to
which members send their children.

"We will only be able to declare victory when all the main
mullahs and others say without reservation that anyone who
engages in this is a criminal and worse," said Babbage.

But a nugget of good news has emerged.

Experts say some JI members were questioning the justification
for a campaign in which many of those killed or wounded were
countrymen. "Internal rifts have destroyed more than one radical
organization; perhaps they will seriously weaken this one," the
ICG report said.