'More JI attacks likely despite Hambali's arrest'

'More JI attacks likely despite Hambali's arrest'

Agence France-Presse, Jakarta

The Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) terror group "remains active and
dangerous" and is likely to mount more attacks despite the arrest
of leading operative Hambali, an international research group
warned on Tuesday.

No one member is indispensable and the Southeast Asian network
probably has thousands of members in Indonesia where it is based,
the International Crisis Group (ICG) says in a report.

Apart from Hambali, who was detained in Thailand this month
and is in U.S. custody, more than 200 JI suspects are in custody
in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.

However, the Aug. 5 bombing of Jakarta's JW Marriott Hotel
which killed 12 people indicates its continuing capacity to
strike, the report says.

JI, which dreams of establishing a regional Islamic state, is
blamed for the Bali blasts last October which killed 202 people
and a string of other bloody attacks in Indonesia and the
Philippines since 2000.

The Brussels-based ICG says information from interrogations
"indicates that this is a bigger organization than previously
thought, with a depth of leadership that gives it a regenerative
capacity.

"It has communication with and has received funding from al-
Qaeda but it is very much independent and takes most if not all
operational decisions locally."

The ICG says more than 200 people who later became JI members,
including all its future top leaders, trained in Afghanistan in
the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"It was in the camps of the Saudi-financed Afghan mujahedin
leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf that they developed jihadist (holy war)
fervor, international contacts and deadly skills."

Afghanistan veterans trained a new generation of more than 200
fighters when JI operated a camp in Mindanao in the southern
Philippines from 1996 to 2000 in a deal with the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front, the ICG says.

Recruits included not only JI members but those of like-minded
organizations in Indonesia.

"This means that Indonesia has to worry about other
organizations as well, whose members have equally lethal skills
but do not operate under the JI command structure," the report
warns.

The JI network is united not just by ideology and training but
also by an intricate network of marriages "that at times makes it
seems like a giant extended family," the report says.

"In many cases, senior JI leaders arranged the marriages of
their subordinates to their own sisters or sisters-in-law to keep
the network secure."

JI also depends on a small circle of pesantren or Muslim
boarding schools to propagate jihadist teachings, the ICG says.

"Of the more than 14,000 such schools in Indonesia, only a
tiny number are committed to jihadist principles but there is a
kind of JI 'Ivy League' to which JI members send their own
children."

Chief among these is al-Mukmin or Pondok Ngruki, whose founder
Abu Bakar Ba'asyir is believed to have been JI's top leader
between late 1999 and his arrest in 2002.

Ba'asyir is on trial in Jakarta for treason.

The ICG says the arrest of Hambali and others has weakened JI.

"But this is an organization spread across a huge archipelago,
whose members probably number in the thousands. No single
individual is indispensable."

The report says "the one piece of good news" is indications
that internal dissent is building within the network.

"Members are said to be unhappy with recent choices of
targets, including the Marriott hotel bombing that killed mostly
Indonesian workers."

The ICG says there is also disagreement about the appropriate
focus for jihad.

"Internal dissent has destroyed more than one radical group
but in the short term, we are likely to see more JI attacks," it
warns.