[AnNahar] Indonesian security forces Wednesday captured a senior member of an Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
-linked krazed killer network once headed by the country's most wanted holy warrior, police said.
Muhammad Basri, from the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen,
| ...with this capture down to thirteen members, unless they've had another shipment of Uighers from China... |
was caught in a joint operation between the police and military in Poso district, on rugged Sulawesi island, while another member of the group was rubbed out.
| ...not thirteen, then, but twelve. How nice! |
"He was caught on Poso's south coast this morning," police front man Boy Rafli Amar told Agence La Belle France Presse, adding he had been taken to a nearby city.
It came two months after the group's leader and Indonesia's most wanted holy warrior, Santoso, was rubbed out by troops, ending a years-long hunt for the Islamic State (IS) group supporter.
His death was a major victory for authorities in the world's most populous Moslem-majority country. Santoso and his group were responsible for deadly attacks on domestic security forces and had trained faceless myrmidons from around the archipelago.
Basri had been the deputy leader of the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen, which has been hiding out in the jungles of Sulawesi for years but now has just a handful of members.
He was seen as a successor to Santoso, although it is not clear if he had officially taken over leadership of the group.
After Indonesia suffered a string of Islamic holy warrior attacks in the early 2000s, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people, authorities launched a crackdown that weakened the most dangerous networks.
But Santoso repeatedly evaded attempts to capture or kill him, with the long-haired, gun-toting krazed killer regularly appearing in videos urging gunnies to launch attacks.
The picture changed recently, with other IS-linked cells on the main island of Java considered a greater threat. 
|
