SOUTH-EAST ASIA: Hambali Driven to Defeat ‘Enemies of Islam’

By Baradan Kuppusamy Reprint | | Print |

Baradan Kuppusamy

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 16 2003 (IPS) - This week’s capture of 38-year-old Hambali, who real name is Riduan Issamuddin, has effectively ended the career of a successful and dedicated Islamic militant who was fired by zeal at the age of 20 to leave his Indonesian village, and go defeat the ‘enemies of Islam’.

He never returned.

When arrested in Thailand, Hambali, who hails from the remote village of Sukamanah in Cianjur, West Java, was the most wanted terrorist suspect in South-east Asia.

Intelligence agencies and police from Indonesia, Malaysia, the United States, as well as testimony by those arrested for the Oct. 12 bombings in Bali put Hambali as the mastermind of those blasts and the one who handed 36,000 U.S. dollars to finance the operation.

Captured operatives have called him the operational head of the Jemaiah Islamiyah group, which seeks to create a pan-Islamic state in the region, and the South-east Asian leader of the al-Qaeda network.

After Hambali’s arrest, U.S. President George W Bush called him ”one of the world’s most lethal terrorists” and Australian Prime Minister John Howard, whose country lost 80 people in the Bali blasts, dubbed him ”the main link between al-Qaeda and Jemaiah Islamiyah”.

But for all his notoriety and fame, Hambali was for many years relatively unknown – outside of a select group of Indonesian exiles living in Malaysia and visiting senior al-Qaeda operatives – until the October 2002 bomb blasts in Bali.

Those blasts that killed 202 people, in addition to past incidents elsewhere in the region, made him a wanted man in at least four countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and the United States.

In the long intervening years between leaving Sukamanah village and the Bali attacks, Hambali fought Soviet troops in Afghanistan, the Philippine army in Mindanao, and Christians in Ambon, Poso and Maluku in Indonesia.

Living in exile in Malaysia in the nineties, Hambali – who Thai officials say is how being interrogated although his location remains unclear – also spent time preaching.

”When Hambali talked about ‘jihad’, you wanted to take up arms and help oppressed Muslims in the world,” Mohamad Sobri, who often attended his ‘usrahs’ or small discussion groups, said in an interview.

U.S. intelligence officials say Hambali helped plan the Sep. 11 attacks in the United States and then took on western interests across South-east Asia.

Security officials in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines add that ‘Hambali’, a nom de guerre taken from Imam Hambali, a famous 8th century Islamic saint, is also linked to attacks in the region that started with the Christmas bombings of churches in Indonesia in December 2000 and the subsequent bombings in the Philippines.

Indonesia’s national detective chief, Commander Gen Ermin Mappaseng said Thursday that Hambali is linked to the Marriott Hotel blast in Jakarta on Aug. 5, which killed 12 people.

”It is an extraordinary career – from village boy to world-class terrorist,” said a senior Malaysian police official who was part of a team tracking Hambali’s regional trail since the 2000 Christmas bombings. ”He put the region in the world terrorism map.”

Hambali is said to be the only non-Arab in al-Qaeda’s military committee. But who really is Hambali? What are the origins of his militancy? How did he have a 13-year successful run with apparent ease?

Law enforcement officers can only piece together his story. There are large gaps. ”We hope with his arrest and interrogation we can finally get the full picture,” said Malaysian police chief Norian Mai, who disclosed Friday that they also helped in Hambali’s capture in Ayutthaya, Thailand.

What is known about Hambali is that between the fighting, he spent long years in obscurity and hardship as an exile.

Like him, dozens of Indonesians had fled the anti-Islamic pogroms periodically unleashed by Indonesian strongman Suharto, whose policies are now widely blamed for radicalising Muslims who otherwise would just have been devout followers of the faith.

Hambali was the eldest of 12 siblings in a deeply religious family and first studied Islam at the ‘sekolah pondok’ or village religious school founded by his grandfather in Sukamanah village. Later, he studied in other Islamic schools in West Java but found the atmosphere stifling.

It was difficult and often dangerous to espouse any form of Islam except the mildest version approved by Suharto, under whose rule any gathering of more than three worshippers need permission from the local military commander, former Indonesian exiles here said in various interviews.

Religious teachers and worshippers were regularly arrested and interrogated, said Ahmad Mustakim, an Indonesian migrant who is now a permanent resident here.

According to Hambali’s mother Eni Mariani, her son was a devout youth who keenly felt this oppression. ”He was very quiet, aloof and reserved,” she told Indonesian media after the Bali blasts.

Malaysia, with its intimate cultural affinities with Indonesia, proximity and easy access across the Straits of Malacca and relatively unrestrained about Islam, was a magnet for people like Hambali.

In 1985, at 20, Hambali crossed over to Malaysia hoping to get a scholarship to study Islam at a local university, but his intended path diverged dramatically.

It is still not clear how, from Malaysia, he ended up as a young fighter in Afghanistan, where the ‘mujahideen’ were fighting Soviet occupiers. As with others, Afghanistan transformed Hambali into a fiery advocate of militant Islam and armed struggle.

Later, while preaching in Malaysia, Hambali would often refer to the time he spent fighting the Soviets and boast of his exploits against the Soviets and his meetings with Osama bin Laden.

The sudden end of the Soviet occupation 1989 found Hambali penniless and rudderless, unable to return home for fear of arrest and incarceration.

Like other Indonesian exiles, Hambali made for Sungei Manggis village, near Banting town about 60 kilometres west of the capital where the founders of the Jemaiah Islamiyah movement – Abdullah Sungkar, Abu Bakar Baasyir and Fikiruddin alias Muhammad Iqbal – were living in exile after fleeing Indonesia in 1987.

They lived in poverty, studied the Quran but dreamt of ‘Darul Islam’ or Islamic Indonesia and preached their version of ‘jihad’.

According to Sungkar, the exiles’ leader, the path to ‘Darul Islam’ is first through the creation of a Jemaiah Islamiyah, or Islamic family, followed by unrelenting ‘jihad’ until success.

”When Hambali came here with his wife in early 1991 he was penniless,” villager Mohammed Yuhana, who rented wooden huts to Indonesian exiles, said in an interview. ”He told me Suharto was after him.”

For much of the next 11 years, the Afghan war veteran and his wife lived in the hut. Conditions were primitive – a hole in the ground for a toilet, zinc roof, a single bulb for light, a standpipe for water and no furniture.

Yuhana said that like other exiles, Hambali struggled to make ends meet, first as a roadside ‘kebab’ seller and later slaughtering chickens at a town market. Later, Hambali peddled Arabic medicines and worked as a itinerant preacher.

But while he lived in poverty, he also worked hard to re-establish his links with al-Qaeda leaders and developed a regional network of operatives.

Hambali spent a lot of years preaching, recruiting, raising funds and sending operatives for arms training, a senior Malaysian official told IPS. He used ‘usrah’ to spot potential recruits.

The recruits first ended up in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan but later many headed for the training camps of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) separatist rebels in Mindanao, southern Philippines. By 1999, these recruits were ending up in Jemaiah Islamiyah camps in Maluku, the province hardest hit by Muslim-Christian riots in Indonesia.

U.S intelligence officials have linked Hambali to figures like Ramzi Yousef, now in jail in the United States for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, and information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, a key al-Qaeda leader arrested in March, is said to support this.

Hambali also organised an al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000, in which two Sep. 11 hijackers, Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi, took part, according to intelligence officials.

Researchers said the fall of Suharto in 1998 and the chaotic conditions that followed was the signal for Jemaiah Islamiyah to head back to Indonesia – where they were no longer unwelcome but courted as figures who had opposed Suharto.

They could preach and organise freely and the communal riots in 1998 formed the background for them to come into their own as defenders of Islam.

Jemaiah Islamiyah leaders Bashir and Sungkar relocated to Indonesia in mid-1999. Sungkar died with weeks after arriving in Indonesia and Baasyir took over Jemaiah Islamiyah. Hambali vanished.