South-East Asian radicals are divided over the wisdom of attacking hotels, nightclubs and other "soft targets" where Muslims may be killed alongside Westerners - an internal split that could weaken the terrorist enterprise, authorities have said. Some militants inside Jemaah Islamiah want their jihad, or holy war, to focus on fighting Christians in certain regions of Indonesia rather than bombing Western targets where Muslims die, too, according to government officials, defence attorneys and an intelligence adviser to Indonesia. The debate among Indonesian militants appears to have intensified after the August 5 bombing of the JW Marriott in Jakarta - whose 12 fatalities were mostly Muslim.
| If we have any luck, they'll be shooting it out any time now... |
A prominent group of Muslim defence lawyers said they would not accept any Marriott bombers as clients. After the Marriott bombing, several senior militants close to Zulkarnaen, Jemaah’s Islamiah’s purported operations chief, expressed displeasure because most the victims were Muslim, said the senior intelligence adviser. He said the information was based on internal Jemaah Islamiah communications picked up by Indonesian intelligence agents. The revelations about the rift coincide with a post-September 11 hobbling of al-Qaeda’s and Jemaah Islamiah’s command-and-control structure that many officials believe has led to more indiscriminate targeting - not just in Indonesia, but around the globe - moving away from al-Qaeda’s tradition of limiting attacks to Western and Jewish targets.
| I don't think innocent bystanders have ever counted, though... |
Dissension inside militant ranks could potentially weaken terrorist networks anywhere in the world, officials said, though it may also mean greater danger as cells attack without the blessings of their peers. In fact, officials in Indonesia, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they’re bracing for more attacks, which they say are increasingly likely, especially during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Indonesia’s national security minister, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, warned in a speech Sunday in Bali that terrorists appear to be "regrouping, reconnecting, recruiting and retraining". Jemaah Islamiah - whose professed goal is to impose an Islamic superstate spanning much of Southeast Asia - is loosely organised with an estimated 3,000 members in the region, including 2,000 in Indonesia.
| That figure probably includes everybody, to include the gunnies in training... |
Several senior Jemaah Islamiah operatives were not privy to either the Marriott bombing or the October 12, 2002 twin nightclub attacks on Bali island that killed 202 people, underscoring the diffuse nature of the terror group and its ability to act without consensus. Most of the Bali blasts’ victims were holidaying foreigners, with only a few Muslims, mostly waiters and other workers, among the dead. That’s because Bali, unlike the rest of Indonesia, is primarily Hindu and because the Sari Club, the worst-hit of the two nightclubs, had a controversial policy of only admitting foreigners.
| The bucks are bigger. I don't know why it was controversial. Milking foreigners is a specialized branch of the dairy industry... |
All this helps explain why the Marriott attack led to far more soul searching among militants than the Bali blasts. Ismail, a key suspect in the Marriott bombing, yesterday said he regretted carrying out the attack because of the high number of Indonesian victims. His remarks came during a police re-enactment of the blast. Increased Muslim deaths are a byproduct of successful blows against al-Qaeda’s command structure, communications and finances as terrorists resort to local targets, said a US counterterrorism official, speaking from Washington. |