Bombshell (27 page)

Among the most fervent supporters of the assassinated Malaysian jihadi leader Noordin Top were several of his wives. Top led a breakaway faction of JI. He attained legendary status because of his ability to evade capture and perpetrate acts of suicide terror directed against Western targets. Top met his first wife, Siti Rahmah, at the Lukmanul Hakim Pesantren, where they were both teachers. The couple married in the late 1990s. Siti's brother, Muhammed Rais, participated in Top's operation against the Marriott Hotel in 2004, and her father, Rusdi Hamid, was also a member of JI. Thus Siti provided an extremely important link between Top and different parts of the organization. Top eventually deserted Siti, leaving her with two small children while she was pregnant with her third child.
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In June 2004, Noordin Top married again, this time to Munfiatun al Fitri. Munfiatun claims that at the time she did not
realize she was marrying a JI leader. She met him through mutual friends, who were JI members, in 2004, and thought Top's name was Abdurrahman Auf. Their mutual friend Hassan then told her that Top was a jihadi. Munfiatun was a teacher who worked at a
pesantren
in West Java and had always expressed the wish to marry a jihadi.
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She was not opposed to her husband's activities, even after she found out that he was wanted by the police. In 2004, when Top was being investigated for his involvement in the first Marriott bombing, Munfiatun claimed that she knew everything about her husband's activities and had known in advance about the attack. However, she did not report any of this to the police because she loved her husband very much.
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In 2005, Top married once again, this time in an arranged wedding to a young woman named Arina, whose father, Barhudin Latif, had orchestrated the match. Arina told police that she was unaware of her husband's true identity when she married him, even though her father certainly would have known. She thought his name was Abdul Ade Halim, and that he was a teacher from Sulawesi.

All these marriages to local women produced a number of benefits for the terror-cell leader. First, in the cases of Siti and Arina, Top's marriages cemented a connection to sympathetic families in the broader jihadi movement. According to police sources, Top married Arina to secure the loyalty and protection of her father, Barhudin. The marriages also allowed Top to blend in with the local population. As Arina's husband, he assumed the identity of a religious man who traveled often, kept strange hours, and avoided social contact with the neighbors. Journalists have presented Arina as a victim, suggesting that she knew practically nothing about Top when she married him and was unaware that their marriage was intended to cement network connections. If these accounts are accurate, it still seems likely that Arina did know he had at least
two other wives. She may have believed that his long absences were for visits to his other family back in Sulawesi.
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Ba'asyir's views on the role of women, gender equality, sexual relations, and social harmony correspond to the Salafi tradition. He opposes women's direct involvement in operations while encouraging them to study Islam and the Hadith. In his
pesantren
women occupied a separate compound, where only female students and teachers were housed. Although the school enforced the strict separation of the sexes, both leaders (Ba'asyir and Sungkar) had an open-door policy for any student, male or female, to ask questions of law or interpretation. One of their most famous female graduates was Rabiah (Robyn) Hutchison, an Australian convert to Islam who fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Hutchison began her jihadi career in Pesantren Al Mukmin in the 1980s. She grew close to both clerics: Sungkar presided at her wedding in 1984 and Ba'asyir signed the
akad nikah
, or wedding contract, when Hutchison married Abdul Rahim Ayub, who became the head of JI's Mantiqi 4 operations in Australia.
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Hutchison spent four years working as a doctor in a mujahideen hospital and orphanage on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border during the Afghan jihad in the 1990s. After several years of marriage, the couple divorced and Hutchison returned to Afghanistan in 2000. There, she consulted with bin Laden to ask him where she could be most useful to the cause.

As there were no midwives or gynecologists in Kandahar and Hutchison had years of medical training, bin Laden sent her to Kabul, where she established a women's clinic and set up schools for girls. (Bin Laden had been largely responsible for opening girls' schools in Kabul, even though the Taliban opposed the education of women, and he was very interested in women's health.)
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Hutchison became famous among the Afghan Arabs for her good deeds and dedication to Islam. She eventually married one of the
leading ideologues in Afghanistan, Mustafa Hamid (known as Abu Walid al Misri), a journalist for Al Jazeera and a member of Al Qaeda's Shura Council and Osama bin Laden's inner circle.

Hutchison demonstrates yet another way in which women play a strategic role among jihadi groups. In her case, her citizenship combined with marriage gave Ayub access to a foreign passport. This was useful both for implementing jihadi operations outside the region and for traveling in general. Her own passport was confiscated by Australia's counter-terror squad, ASIO (the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation). Several of Hutchison's children went on to join jihadi groups. Two of her sons (Muhammed and Abdullah) were arrested in Yemen for terrorist activities; they were allegedly connected to Jack Roche, who was arrested for plotting to blow up the Israeli embassy in Canberra. Her daughter Rahma is married to Khaled Cheikho, a veteran of Lashkar e Toiba, Pakistan's most infamous terrorist organization, and one of nine men charged with conspiring to make explosives in preparation for bombings in Sydney and Melbourne.
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Cheikho was sentenced to life imprisonment in October 2009 after a trial that took almost two years, making it the longest in Australia's history.

All of JI's suicide bombings to date have been carried out by men. A small number of JI women have been caught smuggling bomb detonators and explosive materials from Malaysia into Indonesia, although this would still be considered a support rather than an operational role. However, in 2007 Superintendent Edwin Corvera, the deputy director for the police in Central Mindanao, received reports that the local chapter of JI planned to use women for terrorist operations. Apparently the organization was recruiting women to carry out suicide bomb missions against infrastructure targets and public transportation terminals in the region. Whether the reports were true or not, authorities prepared themselves for a worst-case scenario: more bombings by previously unsuspected
operatives. Corvera ordered the police to deploy policewomen in public bus and train terminals to search female passengers.
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Sidney Jones is not convinced that women in Indonesia will become fully operational. Instead, they spread the message of jihad and contribute to the cause financially. Many JI women are involved in selling Islamic products, from headscarves to home remedies. They often do piecework jobs that at times require them to travel from place to place selling their wares. As they travel, they spread JI's message and brand of Islam. Overall, these women are not facing the same kinds of pressures as their sisters in Chechnya, Palestine, and Iraq, but are just as fervent in their dedication to the terrorist movements.

Not only does JI employ women strategically to cement the organization's bonds but it also uses them to guarantee the survival of the group, ensuring generational continuity by sending the children of JI operatives for militant training to mold them into the next generation of JI. The women, rather than transforming from support roles to operational ones, are instead preparing the way for their children.

THE FUTURE OF THE MOVEMENT

During periods of heightened security and counter-terror activity, JI goes underground to focus on rebuilding and to ensure the future of the group. A source within the organization contends that four pairs of young suicide bombers swore oaths in April 2005, followed by another six pairs in July. The prospective suicide bombers underwent training in
pesantrens
in Central Java and in the Ciamis and Garut areas of West Java. Following training, they were deployed for periods of one to two months in areas of conflict such as West Seram, Maluku, and Poso.

The activists appear to be getting younger and younger. One of the most notorious of JI's new generation of operatives was Fathur
Rohman al Ghozi, a product of one of Ba'asyir's boarding schools, the Al Mukmin Pesantren in Ngruki, Solo, three hours from his village in East Java. At the ripe old age of thirteen, al Ghozi was arrested in the Philippines for planning a bombing spree in Manila that killed twenty-two people and injured eighty.
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One observer reported, “Fathers send their children to the city of Karachi in Pakistan to further their education. These children form the al Ghuraba (foreign) cell. During the spring vacations they undergo military training in Afghanistan.”
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Even in its highly weakened state, JI continues to renew itself and is likely to reemerge from the flames, like a phoenix born again.

By recruiting children, JI has created cadres that are almost impervious to government crackdowns: it is virtually impossible for any government agency to target operatives who are so young. At the same time, the children form extremely strong bonds with other youthful jihadis that will likely last a lifetime. More to the point, should the adult organization be at risk of complete eradication due to failing public support, crackdowns by the police, or the imprisonment of leaders, JI can reconstitute itself with the next generation.

Aware of the potential generational shift, the Indonesian government is mass-producing materials to inoculate children from joining the jihad, such as a comic book aimed at children and teenagers, entitled
When the Conscience Speaks
, in which Bali bomber Ali Imron regrets his actions. In the book, Imron reveals what the recruitment process is like and how to avoid becoming a jihadi.
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Jemaah Islamiya was originally founded with the goal of toppling Suharto's corrupt regime. Once Suharto's dictatorship ended in 1998, JI's new mission became to depose the Indonesian government and fight the evil influence of Western secular culture. However, Indonesia is also the most vibrant democracy in the
Islamic world; its democratic institutions provide a moderate response to the radical Islamic messages emanating from the Wahhabis, the Salafis, and the jihadi terror networks. Moderate Muslims promote a pluralistic and democratic version of Islam in Indonesia and throughout the region.

Unlike in the Middle East, the Islamic political parties advocate and actively participate in free and fair elections. As a result, most Indonesians view JI as a fringe movement. The likelihood that it will depose the Indonesian government through either democratic or other means is low. JI's political ally, Hizb ut Tahrir, performed miserably in the 2009 elections. In fact, the July 2009 attacks against the Ritz-Carlton and the Marriott in Jakarta came only ten days after the reelection (by an overwhelming majority) of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who had ordered the antiterror attacks that nearly ended JI.
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In the aftermath of the 2002 crackdown, women were able to rejuvenate and reproduce JI's support, operational setup, and cellular structure with the next generation of fighters. They are having to do this again as most of the organization's new leaders have been arrested and killed. Samudra was executed—along with Ali Ghufron (Mukhlas) and his brother Amrozi—by a firing squad in November 2008, for complicity in the Bali attacks. The arrest of the second generation of leaders and the assassination of Noordin Top in 2009 have also weakened the organization and will likely force it underground once again. Such setbacks would leave most other terror groups in tatters, yet because of the family links within JI, and because of the significant role played by women, it is likely to survive this current onslaught.

THE RECRUITERS AND PROPAGANDISTS

We will stand, covered by our veils and wrapped in our robes, weapons in hand, our children in our laps, with the Qur'an and the Sunna [sayings] of the Prophet of Allah directing and guiding us.

—Al Khansa'a jihadi website, August 2004
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I use my pen and words, my honest emotions … Jihad is not exclusive to men.

—Umm Farouq
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MALIKA

In May 2010, a Brussels court sentenced fifty-year-old Malika el Aroud to eight years in prison and a 5,000 euro fine for establishing, leading, and financing a terrorist group. According to the judges, Malika used her website to attract the most vulnerable Web surfers and to indoctrinate and then recruit them to the global jihad. Her website got 1,500 users a day and showed reckless disregard for the deaths of young European Muslim men who went to Afghanistan on jihad. After years of house arrests and scrutiny by the police, Malika was finally caught by Belgian officials, on a technicality. In private they told me, “We knew she would make a mistake and
this time,
this time
, we have her.”
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During the almost three years in which she lived under house arrest in a three-bedroom apartment in the Brussels neighborhood of St. Gilles, the police monitored her every move. On trial, she was no longer covered from head to toe in traditional black Islamic garb. Instead she donned Western clothing and let her thick wild hair fall to her shoulders—something she claims her defense attorney and the judge made her do even though it violated the spirit and the letter of Islamic law. Malika had lived in Brussels all her adult life. She speaks fluent French and is extremely articulate. She is also an Al Qaeda legend known to most European intelligence agencies.
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Malika occupies a place at the forefront of the women's movement in the global jihad and is considered extremely dangerous.