Posted on 12/13/2002 4:59:17 PM PST by knighthawk
The bombs that ripped apart Paddys Bar and the Sari Club at the Balinese resort of Kuta on October 12 have reverberated through the surrounding region and exposed the zealots who wish to subdue it to Islam.
While jolting the nations of the southwest Pacific into an unprecedented level of fear and alert, the bombs have also laid bare a network of terror lacing Southeast Asia to the Middle East, Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden.
New arrests in the past two weeks have also demonstrated a response by police and intelligence agencies that has overcome frequently brittle diplomatic relations, reaching into the subterranean world of Islamic terrorism and extracting some of its key regional players.
About 20 suspects are in custody, including Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) leader Abu Bakar Bashir, the organisation's recently appointed head of operations, Ali Gufron, known as Mukhlas, the alleged mastermind of the attack, Imam Samudra, and most of those who carried out the attacks.
Interrogation of Mukhlas has reportedly placed Bashir at a meeting in Thailand in January to plan the Bali attack, along with then-JI operations chief Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali, two Malaysian JI leaders and an unidentified sixth man.
But for all the speed and success of the hunt for the Bali bombers, some of the most important terrorist leaders are still at large, and the dragnet has exposed the depth of the pool terrorists can dredge for recruits willing to kill and be killed in return.
It now appears increasingly likely that the bomb in Paddys Bar was detonated by a suicide bomber in the first attack of its kind in this part of the world - and the broader investigation throughout the region has uncovered unfulfilled plans to use suicide bombers on other targets.
JI, the shadowy network said to be planning to create a pan-Islamic state of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the southern Philippines and Brunei, has further reached into Australia, tapping the extremes of its large Muslim population.
Last month, after intelligence agencies warned of the presence of cells in the country, police arrested Jack Roche, a convert to Islam recruited by JI and sent to Malaysia to meet Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali, who is closely connected to bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Roche, who trained with al Qaeda and met bin Laden in Afghanistan, returned to Australia to try unsuccessfully to recruit others for a series of planned attacks on diplomatic and other targets.
The trail that leads down through the Middle East, Asia and the Indonesian archipelago to Roche in Perth is long, complex and still vague, formed from extreme fundamentalism that regards violence as a legitimate arm of God, and fomented among the poor and disadvantaged who see the West as the font of despair and oppression.
In Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world, the trail found a ready foundation. Among its 250 million people is a community of about 5 million descended from Yemeni traders who appeared in the archipelago about 600 years ago, and who are still frequently identified as "Arab" Indonesians.
Known as hadrami, the community maintains close links with Yemen, sends many of its young men to study at Islamic schools in the small Gulf state, and is among the leaders in the call for the introduction in Indonesia of sharia, or Islamic law.
Many of the Yemeni schools teach Safalism, which accepts the need for violence to purify the faith, and which heavily influenced bin Laden's spiritual development.
Within Indonesia, the hadrami have produced some of the most important figures in regional terrorism, including Bashir - who developed his own network of schools and disciples - and Ja'far Umar Thalib, leader of another militant group, Laksar Jihad.
The United States believes Yemeni terrorists, who tried to bomb American facilities in Indonesia last year, were based at a hadrami school in East Java.
Indonesian militancy was hardened under the long and hard rule of former President Suharto, who feared Islamic fundamentalism and who drove Bashir and other radicals into exile in Malaysia, then to become the breeding ground for regional terrorism.
Bashir, now a frail 64-year-old in detention in hospital as a suspect in a series of church bombings, was jailed under Suharto for advocacy of a jihad (holy war) and attempts to raise an Islamic militia before fleeing to Malaysia with fellow radical, the late Abdullah Sungkar.
The pair founded the now-notorious Islamic school al-Tarbiyyah al-Islamiyah Lugmanulo Hakiem Madrasah in Johor.
The school, closed in January by the Malaysian Government, was to attract a dangerous body of teachers and students, key among them Hambali, the 36-year-old cleric now wanted not only for his alleged role in Bali, but also for a series of bombings in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines over the past two years.
The school - also the alma mater of Mukhlas, his younger brother Amrozi, one of the Bali bombers, and Samudra - was in large part funded by the tithing of the families of wealthy students taught to fight against the enemies of Islam, primarily the US.
In June one of its former teachers, Malaysian Abdullah Daud, told a Government inquiry he was a member of JI, had been to Pakistan and Afghanistan, trained with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the southern Philippines, and had fought against Christians in Ambon, Indonesia.
On his return to Indonesia after Suharto's fall, Bashir established another school in Solo, central Java, and founded the overt Indonesian Mujahideen Council to promote an Islamic state and, allegedly, the shadowy JI network.
Since then JI's tentacles and associations have spread across the region, linked to al Qaeda through Hambali and Omar al-Faruq, sent in 1998 to Indonesia to extend bin Laden's reach and contacts.
Associations were formed with other Indonesian militant groups, including Laksar Jihad - responsible for the carnage on Ambon - and Darul Islam, behind insurrections in Aceh, South Sulawesi and West Java.
Bonds were also forged with the Filipino terror groups Abu Sayyaf and MILF, Malaysia's Kumpulan Mujahideen and other regional radicals.
This year Singapore rounded up more than 30 terrorists, many of them JI members planning suicide and other attacks on foreign embassies and facilities. Others were arrested in Malaysia, and JI members were arrested in the Philippines for a series of bombings.
But cracking JI, when many outsiders were doubtful even if the organisation existed, was for years stymied by its tight cell structure and - until Bali - the reluctance of Indonesia to crack down on its Islamic militants.
The first break came with the arrest in Pakistan of al-Faruq. Like the Bali bombers to follow, he poured out information under interrogation by the American CIA, admitting to being al Qaeda's frontman in Southeast Asia, and to planning a series of bombings with Bashir.
As investigators closed in on JI from this flank, Indonesian and Australian agencies, helped by the FBI and Scotland Yard, were hot on the trail of the Bali bombers through a series of elementary blunders.
Shortly after the bombing they left their getaway motorcycle - with numberplate, fingerprints and traces of explosive - outside a mosque, where it was reported to police.
Elsewhere, the bombers had filed off identifying marks and changed the chassis number of the Mitsubishi van used to hold the Sari Club bomb, but missed another, crucial, number.
Both vehicles were traced to Amrozi, the 40-year-old radical from East Java, who also admitted buying the chemicals for the explosive and outraged the world by smiling and waving during a public interrogation.
Amrozi was the key: his confessions led to his home village, where a cache of assault rifles, pistols and ammunition was uncovered, to the identification of brothers Mukhlas and Ali Imron as accomplices, and to the early arrest of Imron.
Last month, Samudra was arrested and confessed his part as mastermind. He had been tracked by sophisticated eavesdropping on his mobile phone, and identified by two bodyguards arrested several days earlier.
Samudra for the first time pointed to a suicide bomber, Iqbal, at Paddys. DNA evidence and the later discovery of the wills of four apparent accomplices - Yudi, Agus, Rauf and Amin - suggest he is telling the truth.
Last week, in another coup, Mukhlas was cornered and on Wednesday was one of eight suspects taken - in orange prison uniforms, handcuffed and feet manacled - to Bali.
The story that has been pieced together by investigators underscores the religious and strategic aims of Islamic fundamentalism in the region, and its links to al Qaeda.
The Indonesian intelligence agency believes the Bali planners belonged to a group called G272, formed from that number of Indonesians who fought in Afghanistan.
Under the leadership of Hambali, G272 members were among a meeting last January in southern Thailand to develop a regional strategy of striking "soft" targets, such as nightclubs catering to foreigners.
In June, Amrozi bought the van and chemicals for the explosives in Java and, in August and September, met Samudra and others in Solo to plan the bombs.
On October 6 Amrozi arrived with the van in Bali, where he bought the motorcycle. Another team, with suicide bomber Iqbal, prepared separately for Paddys.
The bombs were assembled by Samudra and Dulmatin, a 32-year-old Arabic Javanese electronics expert who used two Nokia 5110 mobile phones to detonate bombs outside the Sari Club and in Denpasar.
At 11.05pm on October 12, if Samudra is telling the truth, Iqbal detonated the 500h-1kg TNT bomb he was carrying in a backpack near the DJ's booth at Paddys, killing those closest and sending others screaming into the street.
Between 10 and 15 seconds later the huge bomb in the Mitsubishi van parked outside the Sari Club earlier in the evening exploded, launching a fireball that raced through the club and back across the street to Paddys. The third bomb exploded at Denpasar about 45 to 60 seconds later.
But even as those allegedly responsible await trial in Bali or head deeper underground, the larger web of terrorism continues to threaten the region.
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