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.