'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.