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2 New terrorism front opens in
Indonesia By Bill Guerin
JAKARTA - Indonesian President Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono has won high marks from both the
United States and Australia for his government's
efforts to combat terrorism, including the recent
capture or elimination of at least 200 terror
suspects. But a new front may be opening in
strife-torn Sulawesi.
Security analysts
have noted that since the elite counter-terrorism
Detachment 88, supplied and trained by the US and
Australia, ramped up its counter-terrorism
operations, there have over the
past
18 months conspicuously been no new major
terrorist attacks against local or Western
targets.
Now, however, a dangerous new
front is opening in the Poso area of Central
Sulawesi province that threatens to spiral into a
new regional security hot spot and raises new
questions about the effectiveness of Indonesia's
anti-terrorism operations.
Fear, loathing
and violence are not new to religiously divided
Poso. An estimated 2,000 people were killed in
communal fighting between Muslims and Christians
in the area until an accord was brokered by the
central government in 2002. That deal never fully
took hold and the Jemaah Islamiyah terror group
has recently exploited the tensions for its own
ideological ends. Several JI operatives have
allegedly gathered in the coastal Poso region to
regroup, recruit, and perhaps even plan new
attacks across the archipelago.
Indonesia's anti-terrorism chief, retired
General Ansyaad Mbai, and General A M
Hendropriyono, former State Intelligence Agency
(BIN) chief, have both said in recent interviews
that the renewed violence in Poso is the work of
JI-inspired terrorists. Authorities say they are
trying to link local players involved in the
region's recent violence to the wider JI network.
JI operatives have reportedly recently
landed in Poso from former sanctuaries in the
southern Philippines, where they were once
welcomed by the rebel Moro Islamic Liberation
Front, but have more recently been flushed out by
US-backed counter-terrorism sweeps by the
Philippine armed forces. Indonesian authorities
have encountered heavily armed fighters during
their recent Poso operations and claim to have
uncovered large weapons caches during raids, which
they contend originated from the southern
Philippines.
Regional intelligence
officials have long claimed that JI ran a
guerrilla training camp at Abubakar, a remote
jungle-covered area on the Philippines' southern
island of Mindanao. If indeed JI is now regrouping
in Poso, as Indonesian authorities contend, it
marks a worrisome new development. JI was
responsible for the 2002 Bali bomb attacks, which
killed more than 200 people, including 88
Australians, as well as the bombings in 2005 of
the J W Marriott Hotel and the Australian Embassy
in Jakarta.
According to Western and
regional intelligence officials, JI's motivating
ambition is to create a regional Muslim caliphate
encompassing territories in Indonesia, Malaysia,
Singapore, Thailand, Australia and the
Philippines. The group reportedly has four main
operational divisions scattered across the region:
Mantiqi I, which covers peninsular Malaysia and
Singapore; Mantiqi II, based in Central Java,
which covers Java, Sumatra, and most of eastern
Indonesia; Mantiqi III, which encompasses Sabah,
East Kalimantan and Sulawesi; and Mantiqi IV,
which includes territories in Papua and Australia.
Through mainly covert operations,
Indonesian counter-terrorism forces, with US and
Australian support, are now aggressively aiming to
defuse that plan by intensifying their activities
in Central and East Java. For instance, Detachment
88 tracked down and killed in East Java bomb maker
Azahari bin Hussin, a Malaysian who reportedly
played a pivotal role in both the 2002 and 2005
Bali bombings. In late January, Detachment 88
raided the houses of alleged Muslim militants in
Poso, where several suspects were detained and at
least 16 killed, including Ustadz Mahmud and
Ustadz Riansyah, both considered senior JI
members.
Two days after the crackdown, the
Brussels-based International Crisis Group released
a report suggesting that militants based in Poso
might extend their violent operations beyond
Central
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