Revelations from interrogations of
al-Qaeda linked operative Umar Patek have raised
new questions about the status of ties between
South and Southeast Asia terror groups.
Captured in January 2011 in Abbottabad,
Pakistan, the same town where US special forces
four months later assassinated al-Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden in a covert raid, Patek was
extradited to his native Indonesia to face charges of
masterminding the 2002 Bali
bombing as a leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)
terror group.
According to information
from the interrogations, Patek has confessed to
his role in the Bali bombings but has left
unanswered questions about his links to Osama bin
Laden. He has also reportedly provided insights to
the recent foundering of once strong relations
between al-Qaeda jihadists in South Asia and
terror groups in Southeast Asia.
To be
sure, there will be questions about the
reliability of Patek's revelations since
experienced al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)
members are known to be well-trained in
counter-interrogation. His admission of assembling
the bombs that exploded at the Bali nightclub that
killed over 200 people, mostly Australian
tourists, have been largely consistent with the 86
witness accounts against him.
However,
Patek, who reportedly trained with al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan before the September 11, 2001 terror
attacks on the United States, has also said that
he was in Pakistan not to meet Osama bin Laden but
rather was on his way to Afghanistan to fight
American forces and build a new terror network
there. In a 30-minute video of Patek's
interrogation in September 2011, he said: "It was
pure coincidence that I was in the same town as
Osama bin Laden ... It had to be God's will."
Whether Patek is concealing information
about his knowledge of bin Laden's whereabouts is
unclear. The fact that Patek's local facilitator
led to Patek's capture and the tracking down of
bin Laden's facilitator led the US to his
whereabouts makes it possible that Patek and bin
Laden were arranging to meet through the same
network. There have been no official statements
from the Pakistani or Indonesian governments to
affirm that Patek and bin Laden were in Abbottabad
by coincidence.
On the contrary,
intelligence officials in the Philippines and
Indonesia believe that only al-Qaeda would have
had the resources Patek needed to set up a
training camp in Afghanistan. Furthermore, after
having spent more than a decade engaging in jihad
in Indonesia and the Philippines, Patek's shift to
Pakistan would have involved serious motives, such
as meeting bin Laden and gaining access to
al-Qaeda funds through him, the intelligence
officials suggest.
Patek's most
significant revelation so far is that he felt
frustrated by Southeast Asian jihadists' lack of
ties to militants in South Asia. This is
reportedly one reason why he was idle for months
in the home of his facilitator in Abbottabad
waiting for a trusted contact to move him to
Afghanistan. This also could explain why he was
headed to Afghanistan in the first place-to
rebuild lost ties between the regional networks in
South and Southeast Asia.
After two
decades of South and Southeast Asian jihadist
coordination, the links between the two regions
now appear to be unraveling, if Patek's assessment
is accurate. The terror problems Southeast Asia
faced in the 1990s and 2000s were less the product
of jihadis radicalized at home and motivated more
by Southeast Asians who went abroad to fight in
Afghanistan against then Soviet Union occupiers
and were inculcated with radical ideology.
With this Afghanistan-influenced crop of
jihadi leaders now dying out and certain
indications that once strong links between South
and Southeast Asian terror networks are
diminishing, Southeast Asia's terror problem could
conceivably diminish in the decades ahead
Coordinated responses If so it
will take stronger surveillance and cross border
coordination among regional intelligence agencies.
Taking advantage of the region's loose border
controls, al-Qaeda held secret meetings in
Southeast Asia to coordinate attacks against
Western targets. The 9/11 attacks against the US
were plotted from Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, while
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing's conspirator,
Ramzi Yousef, fled to Manila after the attack.
Other plots to assassinate the Pope and to
blow up 12 international airplanes heading from
Asia to the US in a two-day period, known as the
Bojinka plot, were also hatched in Southeast Asia
during the early 1990s, although the latter two
never came to fruition.
In the mid-1990s
Southeast Asian Afghanistan veterans established
their own regional terror networks with funding
connected to al-Qaeda. For instance, Abdurajik
Janjalani returned from Afghanistan to found Abu
Sayyaf with bin Laden's financial support in his
native Mindanao in the southern Philippines;
Zulkifli bin Hir (Marwan) founded Kumpulan
Mujahidin Malaysia (KMM) in his native Malaysia;
and Abu Bakar Bashir and Abdullah Sungkar founded
JI while in exile in Malaysia before the fall of
Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998.
By
the 2000s, the key operatives of Southeast Asian
terror networks were almost all former Afghanistan
jihadis who were able to maintain financial and
operational links back to al-Qaeda. Bali bombing
masterminds Azahari Husin, Dulmatin, Hambali and
Patek, were all Afghanistan jihadi veterans who
brought their terror skills back to Indonesia
under the banner of JI.
After 9/11 and the
2002 Bali bombings, the US teamed up with the
Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to fight Abu
Sayyaf. The US and Australia also funded the
establishment of Indonesia's counter-terrorism
squad Detachment 88, which by 2005 had received
nearly US$100 million from Washington and
Canberra. The results of that counter-terrorism
cooperation have been tangible.
Since
2001, Abu Sayyaf's numbers have dwindled from more
than 1,000 fighters to somewhere between 300 and
400 today, while the fighting has been reduced
mostly to the outer edges of Mindanao on Sulu and
Jolo islands. Unmanned US drones have recently
helped to locate Abu Sayyaf operatives and
reportedly provided the Philippine Air Force with
the coordinates to take out key JI and Abu Sayyaf
leaders in February 2012.
Detachment 88's
track record since 2007 is also impressive. In
2007, the unit captured wanted JI operative Abu
Dujana in Central Java with the help of US
satellites operated by Australian police which
tracked his cell phone activities. In 2010,
Detachment 88 tracked down JI operative Dulmatin,
who had a $10 million bounty on his head, in an
Internet cafe in Jakarta. In May 2011, Abu Bakr
Bashir received a 15-year prison sentence for
sponsoring a terrorist camp in Aceh that
Detachment 88 located and raided in 2010.
With the elimination of these core JI and
Abu Sayyaf leaders, neither group is as strong as
it was at their height in the late 1990s and early
2000s. Southeast Asia's battle against terrorism
is now being fought largely against its own
citizens who were radicalized domestically rather
than in Afghanistan and thus lack the lethal
expertise of previous generation terrorists.
As Patek's attempts to build new networks
between South and Southeast Asian terror groups
indicate, the battlefields of Afghanistan today
lack the Southeast Asian battalions seen in the
1980s and 1990s. Southeast Asian governments are
thus less likely to face the same imported terror
threats after the planned US withdrawal from
Afghanistan as they did in the 1990s when jihadi
veterans returned to their homelands. With the
dying of an old generation of terrorists, Patek's
ongoing interrogations will likely be of only
limited insight and value.
Jacob
Zenn is a graduate of Georgetown Law's Global
Law Scholars program and was a State Department
Critical Language Scholar in Indonesia in 2011. He
writes about regional affairs in Southeast Asia,
Central Asia, and Nigeria.
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