Indonesians who have joined fellow extremists fighting in Syria could help reinvigorate a once-powerful militant group responsible for major bombings in the world’s most populous Muslim country, a report said.
“The conflict in Syria has captured the imagination of Indonesian extremists in a way no foreign war has before,” said a report by Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict published this week.
It is a change of pattern for Indonesian militants who previously have gone to Afghanistan in the late 1980s and 1990s mainly for training, or to the Palestinian territories to give moral and financial support to fellow Muslims, the report said.
“The enthusiasm for Syria is directly linked to predictions in Islamic eschatology that the final battle at the end of time will take place in Sham, the region sometimes called Greater Syria, or the Levant, encompassing Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel,” the report added.
This notion has attracted Indonesians from different radical streams to go or try to go to Syria, including the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a group responsible for the 2002 bombings on Bali that killed 202 people, mostly foreigners.
After the 2002 attack, a government crackdown that either killed or jailed JI’s leaders has crippled the group and attacks carried by it or its splinter groups have been smaller.
Some of the JI leaders have now taken to non-violent activities such as preaching, inviting criticism from other militant groups.
However, the report warned that the Syrian conflict had convinced many extremists that their local jihad should be set aside for now to devote energy to the more important one abroad, like many JI leaders have argued.
Despite JI’s decline, “if the Syrian conflict helps both JI’s fund-raising ability as well as its own recruitment and if domestic political situation should take a turn for the worse, that calculus could change. No one should rule JI out of future actions,” the report said.
The report quoted the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as estimating there were 50 Indonesians among the 8,000 foreign fighters from 74 countries involved in the Syrian conflict.
JI’s humanitarian wing, Hilal Ahmar Society Indonesia, sent 10 delegations to Syria carrying cash and medical assistance to the Islamist resistance in an effort to open channels for more direct participation in the fighting, the report said.
Five of seven men identified as having gone to fight are graduates of Al-Mukmin Islamic boarding school on Java, a school notorious for spawning Indonesian militants and whose founder, cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, is in prison after being convicted of terrorism.
After counter-terrorism police killed six members of Islamic militant group Western Indonesia Mujahideen last month, authorities said that one of those killed had planned to go to Syria.
Testimony from a surviving member of the group said all six had planned to go to Syria and had robbed a bank to finance the trip and that a member of the group was already in Syria to assist upon their arrival, the report said.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the