SE Asia religious groups sent thousands for `terror training'

SE Asia religious groups sent thousands for `terror training'

Agence France-Presse, Sydney, Australia

Religious groups across Southeast Asia sent up to 3,000 followers to Afghanistan and the Philippines to be trained as terrorists, according to a U.S. study widely reported here.

Many more radicals than previously realized have been trained and sent home to Southeast Asian countries to set up sleeper terrorist cells, warns Boston-based professor Zachary Abuza, who prepared the document.

Abuza's report, Tentacles of Terror -- al-Qaeda's Southeast Asian Network, says most of the radicals had committed themselves to religious war in their home countries, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

"Most Southeast Asians returned and set about committing themselves to running jihads at home, recruiting followers in an attempt to create Islamic states governed by Sharia law," it says.

The report, quoted extensively by The Australian newspaper and ABC radio, says ties formed nine years ago between regional network Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda are now being identified at an alarming rate.

JI, recently outlawed, has been blamed for the Oct. 12 Bali bombing in which more than 190 people were killed, almost half of them Australian.

Abuza believes bin Laden saw Southeast Asia as a region of great potential for recruitment and fomenting Islamic revolution.

The region includes a number of countries with weak governments, porous borders, identity theft and laundering, access to arms markets, and corrupt bureaucracies that give terrorists space to train and operate.

The report says the terrorist mastermind had also identified Indonesia as a vulnerable link in the region, adding: "Al-Qaeda has taken advantage of the political instability and has looked upon Indonesia as a new frontier."

Abuza, who has made submissions to Australian Federal Police based on his information, told ABC radio the region now harbored some 1,000 potential terrorists trained in Afghanistan and the Philippines.

He also believed JI is an organization of at most 500 people, many of whose senior leaders had recently been caught.

Abuza, from Boston's Simmons College, said U.S. special forces had played an important role in helping the Philippines military eliminate training camps run by Philippines rebel groups Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Most JI members appeared to have trained at MILF-run camps in the Philippines, Abuza said.

But the war on terrorism had eliminated camps in Afghanistan and the Philippines.