Indonesian militants fighting in Syria
1 Feb AFP
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, or JI, a
group responsible for the 2002 bombings on the resort island of Bali
which 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 foreign ministry 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.In January, after counter-terrorism police
killed six members of Islamic militant group Western Indonesia
Mujahideen, authorities announced 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.
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