I am meeting Titin, 39-year-old Indonesian wife of Mubarok, alias Utomo Pamungkas, one of the terrorists in prison for his role in the 2002 Bali bombing. Titin has never spoken to a foreigner before. It's not easy to meet the wife of a jihadi; permission is first required from her husband, who is serving a life sentence in the Metro Jaya Detention Centre in Central Jakarta. Titin and her daughters, Asma, 11, and Qonita, 9, sit in the brightly lit Dunkin' Donuts in teeming Yogyakarta, Central Java. No one notices the fully veiled woman and her daughters. It's a surreal situation: here is the radical Muslim family of a notorious terrorist at ease in an American fast-food outlet, the type that attracts "infidels" and attracts deadly attacks.
Titin has not told her daughters of their father's background, or why he is in solitary confinement. When the girls visit him, every six months, she tells them he is living at a university: "They know only that their father is studying at a school for adults. I think they are too young to understand the truth."
Titin stands by her man, claiming his role in the bombing was indirect. Mubarok's bank account was used to transfer money to fund the Kuta bombings. He helped send explosives to Bali and drove a van used in one of the blasts to the island. An Afghan war veteran trained in the southern Philippines, he and most of the other Bali bombers taught religion an Islamic boarding school in East Java.
Asked if she is committed to jihadi principles, Titin hedges. Recently she was approached to teach at a madrassa and enroll her children. JI constantly tries to recruit the family, and Titin claims she struggles to avoid its clutches.