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| Southeast Asia |
| Top looking for new recruits |
| 2006-05-06 |
| Indonesia's most-wanted terrorist suspect Noordin Mohammed Top has been looking beyond his traditional network for experienced jihadists, and operating under his own orders to carry out deadly attacks against Western targets, a report said Friday. Hemmed in by a massive police hunt and isolated by his violent tactics from moderate members of his group - the regional terrorist Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) - Noordin has turned to militant Indonesian Islamic groups and others to build a "following committed to al-Qaeda style attacks," the report said. "Many JI members reportedly see the group he has cobbled together - he grandly calls it al-Qaeda for the Malay Archipelago - as a deviant splinter that has done great harm to the organisation they joined in the mid-1990s," wrote the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG). As a result, the radical militant has had to build a group of like-minded individuals with various backgrounds who answer only to Noordin, who allegedly "justifies his actions by citing jihadist doctrine that under emergency conditions a group of two or three or even a single individual can take on the enemy without instructions from an imam." The ICG report points to evidence from a September 2004 embassy bombing, which left 11 dead, including the suicide bomber, showing Noordin used a blend of JI members, alumni of militant Islamic schools and Darul Islam, an Indonesian Islamic militant group which sent members to Sulawesi and Maluku provinces to wage jihad after violence erupted in 1999. After the embassy bombing, Noordin also used couriers to contact the leader of a different Darul Islam faction with experience in the Philippines, and a former leader of the Islamic charity KOMPAK in Ambon, the provincial capital of Maluku, according to the report. "For four years Noordin has tapped into jihadist networks to build a following of diehard loyalists," the ICG said. "Jemaah Islamiyah, the region's largest jihadist organisation, continues to provide the hard core of that following." "But beginning in 2004, Noordin began reaching out to young men from other organisations and some with no previous organisational affiliation," it added. The report praised the work of Indonesian authorities in chasing down Noordin, who was almost captured last Saturday in a police raid that left two members of his inner circle dead. Noordin has narrowly escaped arrest on several other occassions, and his partner, the notorious bomb-maker Azahari bin Husin, was killed in November during a dramatic police raid on his hideout in East Java. But although Saturday's raid and a string of other arrests may have left the most-wanted militant short of funds, materials and experienced fighters, his network remains and so does the threat, the report said. "The Indonesian police are closing in on Noordin Mohammed Top, South-East Asia's most-wanted terrorist," the ICG said. "If and when they capture Noordin, they will have put the person most determined to attack Western targets out of commission. "But the problem of Noordin's support structure will still have to be tackled," it adds. "The networks he drew on will survive as a potential source of recruits for future operations." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |