| New York Times | - |
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesians have joined the thousands of foreign fighters who have traveled to Syria
to help extremist groups trying to create an Islamic state there,
according to a new report, a finding that analysts said Friday could
help ...
Indonesian Militants Join Foreigners Fighting in Syria
JAKARTA,
Indonesia — Indonesians have joined the thousands of foreign fighters
who have traveled to Syria to help extremist groups trying to create an
Islamic state there, according to a new report, a finding that analysts
said Friday could help revive a weakened jihadi movement in Indonesia
and set off more attacks on minority Shiites in the Southeast Asian
country.
The report
by the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, based in Jakarta,
said that the Syrian conflict, approaching its third anniversary in
March, had “captured the imagination of Indonesian extremists in a way
no foreign war has before.”
“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
said, adding that atrocities committed by government forces against
Sunni Muslims have been given strong play in the Indonesian news media
and on radical websites.
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Sidney
Jones, the institute’s director, said the Indonesian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, based on information from the Syrian government,
estimated that at least 50 Indonesians had traveled to Syria via Turkey
to take up arms since 2012. While she emphasized that the figure was “a
guesstimate,” the report warned that the numbers could increase.
As
many as 11,000 foreign fighters have poured into Syria by way of the
Middle East and North Africa. The fighters include radicalized young
Muslims with Western passports from Europe, North America and Australia.
Ms.
Jones said Indonesian fighters could easily fly on commercial airlines
to Turkey, where Ahrar al-Sham, one of the Islamic groups fighting the
government of President Bashar al-Assad, helped them cross the border
into Syria. Some Indonesian extremists have also been linking up with
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a hard-line group linked to Al
Qaeda, she said.
“There
are two main concerns for Indonesia,” Ms. Jones said. “One is the
return of foreign fighters and what that could mean to providing
leadership to the very weak and incompetent jihadi movement here.”
“Second,
the process of raising funds for Syria could strengthen the resource
base of groups in Indonesia, such as Jemaah Islamiyah,” she said,
referring to the Southeast Asian terrorist network linked to Al Qaeda
that carried out the Bali bombings in 2002, and whose members and
splinter cells carried out other terrorist attacks in Indonesia from
2000 to 2009. She said Jemaah Islamiyah had used its network to recruit
and send Indonesian fighters to Syria.
Indonesian
extremists are known to have trained and fought in Afghanistan in the
1980s and ’90s, in the southern Philippines and possibly in Bosnia. The
involvement of Indonesian fighters in Syria became more prominent after
an extremist from the Borneo Island of Indonesia named Riza Fardi was
killed there last year, according to the report from the Institute for
Policy Analysis of Conflict.
His
death was announced on Nov. 28 on the Twitter account of Suquor al-Izz
Brigade, an armed group with which Mr. Riza was fighting, the report
said. It added that Mr. Riza graduated from Al Mukmin Islamic boarding
school, in the Central Java Province of Indonesia, an institution that
has produced multiple terrorists and whose founder, the radical cleric
Abu Bakar Bashir, is in prison on a terrorism conviction.
The
report said that Indonesian Islamic organizations had made multiple
humanitarian missions to Syria since the conflict began, “bringing in
cash and medical assistance to the Islamist resistance in a way
apparently designed to open channels for more direct participation in
the fighting.”
Noor
Huda Ismail, the founder of the Institute for International Peace
Building, which helps assimilate former Indonesian terrorists back into
society, noted that six people suspected of being terrorists who were
killed after an all-night standoff beginning on Dec. 31 in a town
outside Jakarta were planning to travel to Turkey and had already bought
airline tickets.
“At
the microlevel, most of the Indonesians who travel to Syria — whether
they fight or were involved in humanitarian actions — they will tell
their story when they return and inspire others to follow in their
footsteps,” he said. “Individuals who travel there manage to provide a
new narrative about jihad, which will be widely translated. This new
narrative is the most important thing — a narrative about enlarging the
conflict.”
Mr.
Noor said the Syrian civil war was viewed by many Muslims as a conflict
between Sunnis and the Shiite-backed government of Mr. Assad. He said
the participation of Indonesian fighters would have ramifications back
in Indonesia, which is the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation and
has a small minority of Shiites who in recent years have faced
harassment and physical attacks.
“The
Indonesian Shiite groups are worried about these movements,” Mr. Noor
said. “It creates ramifications where you see tensions between the Sunni
and Shiite communities in Indonesia.”
Ms.
Jones, of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, said another
major concern was that Jemaah Islamiyah, which had fallen off the radar
after ceasing terrorist attacks on Western targets in Indonesia in 2007
because of, among other things, an internal backlash over the fact that
the majority of its victims were Indonesian Muslims, was increasing its
prestige by helping to send fighters to Syria.
The revival of Jemaah Islamiyah as a jihadi organization could have significant consequences in the long term, she said.
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