Reuters AlertNet - Some facts about Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiah

09 Sep 2004 11:36:49 GMT

Source: Reuters

LONDON, Sept 9 (Reuters) - A powerful car bomb exploded outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta on Thursday, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 130.

Regional terror experts said the attack was almost certainly the work of the shadowy Jemaah Islamiah network, seen as the Southeast Asian arm of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.

Following are some details about Jemaah Islamiah based on information from Western and Asian intelligence officials and analysts.

- The Jemaah Islamiah (Islamic Community), once little known outside Southeast Asia, was blamed for the 2002 bomb attacks in Bali that killed 202 people, and for a car bombing of Jakarta's J.W. Marriott hotel last year that killed 12 people.

- Jemaah Islamiah's avowed aim is to establish a conservative Islamic state across the Malay archipelago encompassing Indonesia, the southern Philippines, Brunei, Singapore, peninsular Malaysia and southern Thailand.

- The group has its roots in Indonesian Muslim nationalist movements of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Most of these were crushed or faded away in the 1960s as independent Indonesia's second president, Suharto, took power.

- Abu Bakar Bashir, the 65-year-old cleric described as the group's spiritual leader, is currently in jail in Indonesia awaiting former terror-related charges.

Bashir, of Yemeni descent, became active in the 1970s, leading an Islamic youth movement in Indonesia under another cleric, Abdullah Sungkar.

-- In the 1980s, Abdullah Sungkar went to Afghanistan to participate in the Soviet-Afghan war, laying the foundations for Jemaah Islamiah's links with al Qaeda.

- In 1985, a string of bombings, fires and unrest around Jakarta prompted Suharto to order a new crackdown on the Islamic opposition. Sungkar and Bashir fled to Malaysia.

- As Suharto's rule ended in 1998, Bashir, at the centre of a network that intelligence officials say was radicalised by contacts with al Qaeda, returned home. When Sungkar died in 1999, Bashir became Jemaah leader, some experts say.

- Until Sept. 11, 2001, Jemaah Islamiah's targets had been churches and shopping centres. After the Sept. 11 attacks on Washington and New York, Jemaah Islamiah switched its attention to Western targets in Southeast Asia.