Gods and demons, p.9
Gods and Demons, page 9
The following morning I travelled a hundred kilometres south by bus past jade patchworks of rice paddies and thick vegetation to Semarang, on the north coast of Central Java. A huge port city of the Dutch colonial era with a melting pot of cultures and an extensive Chinatown, this was where Ismail lived with his wife and toddler son. He and Haryanto picked me up at the bus station. We wound our way through the city’s landmarks and numerous mosques before dropping into Ismail’s home.
A vibrant man of boundless energy, Ismail was keen to show me one of his deradicalisation initiatives, a literary café that isolated ex-terrorists like Mahmudi Haryono, alias Yusuf, from terror networks. The epitome of politeness, Yusuf, a clean-cut, wiry 35-year-old, appeared the most unlikely terrorist. With Ismail’s aid, he had secured a job after his jail term for helping the JW Marriott Hotel bombers in 2003. Everything now looked quite rosy; he had a baby daughter and a wife. But this didn’t stop the former Jemaah Islamiah militant pining for his jihadist ties. ‘It’s like a drug,’ Ismail said.
Yusuf teetered on a knife edge. ‘If it wasn’t for Huda I would have been activated,’ he told me while serving drinks. One phone call and he’d be hooked again. ‘I became more radicalised in jail. It strengthened my cause. Jihad is still my obligation. I hate the government. The temptation of terrorism is always there.’ It was the motto of thousands.
I shot some photos of Yusuf praying at the mosque, and we headed off to a restaurant from where I filed a piece to The Australian.
Understanding the wives and their nebulous commitment was a deeper conundrum. Ismail explained our best course with Titin. ‘Wait for me in Yogyakarta,’ he said, which was the closest city to her village.
From Semarang, I travelled to Central Java’s cultural capital by train. For a couple of dollars I watched a rolling panorama of emerald rice terraces and mountains. The ranging, captivating beauty of Java a fertile heartland containing over half of Indonesia’s population – sped by from my near empty carriage with paneless windows, the soft breeze fanning my face, before chugging into the royal city.
On the prearranged day in Yogyakarta’s centre, Ismail swung by in his Range Rover and, hopping into the front passenger seat, I turned to face Titin. My first impression of the diminutive woman in the back seat was that of a giggly girl, flanked by her two young daughters. Her eyes crinkled behind optical glasses; a narrow strip across her eyes was the only exposed part of her face. She was clad in a niqab, the garb of the zealous Islamic Salafists, which covered her entire body.
She and her daughters had come from a remote village forty kilometres outside Yogyakarta where the family lived with Mubarok’s father Harsono, who was deeply disappointed in his son.
Ismail pondered an appropriate café for our interview. Where do you take a terrorist’s wife clad in a niqab? Surprisingly he chose a brightly lit Western joint, Dunkin’ Donuts. Noticing an adjoining bookstore, he dashed in and bought gifts for Titin’s daughters, Asma, eleven, and Qonita, nine.
In Dunkin’ Donuts, no one raised an eyebrow at the fully veiled woman and her daughters. It was a surreal situation: here was the radical Muslim family of an infamous terrorist enjoying an American fast-food outlet, the type that attracted ‘infidels’ and which terrorists aspired to blow up. But Titin appeared indifferent to her environment. Settling down to afternoon tea, I was fascinated to see how she navigated a muffin with jam and a cup of tea beneath a flap covering the lower part of her face. It had not always been successful: her black niqab, which she’d started wearing after Mubarok’s arrest in 2003, was stained with old food.
Titin hadn’t told her daughters of their father’s jihadic background, or why he was in prison serving a life sentence in solitary confinement at the Polda Metro Jaya Detention Centre in central Jakarta.
When the girls paid him six-monthly visits under her supervision, she pretended he was living at a university.
‘They know only that their father is studying religion at a school for adults. I think they are too young to understand the truth. We can’t just say that their father is jailed, now, can we?’ Neither would she divulge the truth in the future, ‘unless they ask’. ‘I’m afraid if they know it will damage them psychologically,’ she said to me. ‘Sometimes it makes me cry when the younger one asks, “Why doesn’t my father want to come home?”’
I tried to fathom the children’s reactions if they knew their father’s past. Perhaps it would be akin to discovering your father was a war criminal.
‘If one day they know what happened to their father, certainly it will demolish their image of a father,’ Ismail said to me. For now, Mubarok was saved by a conspiracy protecting him from condemnation by his own children.
And so, in the mysterious world of jihadists’ wives, it was unknown to what extent children were indoctrinated. ‘It’s like a secretive sect,’ Ismail almost whispered. Husbands dictated all aspects of family life, even from prison, leaving children vulnerable to radicalisation.
When I returned to Jakarta, I asked Seto Mulyadi, the chief of the advisory board of Indonesia’s Commission of Child Protection, about their prospects.
‘They’re being brainwashed,’ he replied unequivocally from his rambling home office. ‘They are influenced by their fathers’ jihad doctrine and beliefs from a very early age. Gradually they will become a threat to society.’ Seto knew these children well; he was involved in an orphanage program separating them from radical families.
But at our Dunkin’ Donuts meeting, Titin maintained her daughters were typical kids. At that moment they were leaning back in cubicles, immersed in their new books like typical kids. But the sisters’ extreme Islamic dress portrayed a different picture. It followed they would, like their mother, eventually wear the niqab – equated with radical Islam in Indonesia – though Titin said she wouldn’t enforce it. ‘I don’t know what will happen in the future but I don’t want them to follow a radical path.’
Despite the rhetoric, Ismail shared the view that children were potential high risks. Putting it into context, Mubarok, who continued to make family decisions, told Ismail for his book, ‘I was part of an underground movement organisation, the Jemaah Islamiah. Jihad is the path of my struggle, to die shaheed [as a martyr] is my goal.’
Titin stood by her man, claiming he had an indirect role in the crime. But Mubarok’s bank account had been used to transfer money to fund the Kuta bombings. He’d helped send explosives to Bali and driven 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 at the family-run Islamic pesantren, al-Islam, in Tenggulun village, Lamongan, East Java.
When I asked Titin if she was committed to jihadi principles, she prevaricated. She had been approached to teach at a radical Islamic boarding school and enrol her children. JI had persistently tried to recruit the family, and Titin claimed it was a constant battle avoiding its clutches. Hardcore charities aligned to Islamic networks typically offered financial aid to struggling families whose main source of income had been severed.
Enter Ismail, the avuncular surrogate father to the children, who tried to break the cycle by providing financial independence through a small enterprise for wives of terrorists. It was one of his deradicalisation programs which operated through his Jakarta-based International Institute for Peace Building.
In the end, he was afraid the funding would fall into enemy hands. But Titin’s children, who attended an Islamic public school deemed moderate by extreme Muslims, were enough of a risk for Ismail to donate money for a secular education. He was afraid they would otherwise be recruited.
Titin was young and bright and had graduated from Surabaya University, East Java, with an English degree, but despite her fluent English she avoided engaging directly with me. She had never spoken with a foreigner before.
Now, a pariah, she was selling children’s clothes in the village where the family lived. She was isolated and scorned, and she couldn’t get a job. Her girls were bullied and couldn’t go to school.
During the six-monthly prison visits, she hadn’t seen the other wives of the Bali bombers apart from Ali Imron’s wife, she told me.
Wives typically purported to know nothing of their husbands’ activities. Hardcore Islamic doctrine allowed men to leave families indefinitely without explanation. When Mubarok left for three months to prepare for the Bali bombings, he’d simply told Titin, ‘I have to go away for a while.’
In a generational handover, the eldest son of Imam Samudra perpetuated his father’s legacy. He fought for Islamic State in Syria for almost two years before being killed there.
Aged nineteen, Umar Jundul Haq, nicknamed Uncu, died in October 2015.
Umar was by no means the first son of an infamous Indonesian terrorist to be killed in the Middle East. But as the son of a Bali bomber, he had cachet reserved for few other Indonesian extremists.
‘These kids are preaching a heritage type of jihad. Like father, like son,’ said Taufik Andrie, director of Ismail’s Institute of International Peace Building. I’d met him there in 2011 and maintained contact.
‘If you raise them in jihad conditioning, they will preach it. If you’re a good mother and father your son should be a jihadi.
‘That’s why they sent them to radical pesantrens and to Syria and Iraq,’ he said.
After five years of brutal fighting, IS’s attempts to create a Middle East caliphate were defeated in March 2019 but the commitment to violence at home re-emerged.
That year an estimated 500 Indonesian men, women and children were stranded in Syria. It was feared IS returnees would use their combat skills at home, propelled toward the goal of establishing an Islamic state
*
It was at a government high school in East Java that Titin sampled her first taste of radical Islam. Proving indoctrination is rampant, even in secular schools, her teacher, connected to JI, arranged her marriage to Mubarok. Two and a half years later, he was arrested. The question on my lips was: did she still love him? She paused before answering. ‘There is only one in my life; I am still in love with him.’
Apart from the scores of innocent victims Mubarak left in the wake of the blast, his own daughters will never know him. ‘Does he regret that?’ I asked her.
There was an unreal quality to her answers as she spoke through Ismail and her niqab. ‘He never expresses anything, but I can see he is sad. One time he wrote me a letter saying he almost cries to see his children growing up without him.’ Of the bombing, he told her, simply, ‘I made a mistake and this is the big lesson for me in my life.’
Titin told me she’d only discovered Mubarok was involved after police released his name on TV three months after the bombing. ‘When he said he had to go away, I did not ask why. I started to make a connection when I saw Amrozi [Mukhlas’s younger brother] arrested on TV. My husband and Amrozi were very close friends.’ What Amrozi lacked in brains, Samudra made up for. Ismail told me, ‘He had the best rhetoric, he was clever and technologically savvy, but Mukhlas was the leader. He was charismatic with a deep religious understanding.’
*
For my piece I also contacted Mukhlas’s widow, Paridah Abas, through her brother, Nasir Abas, a former key JI militant turned police collaborator. I had met him in 2011 incidentally at an official lunch in Jakarta, later interviewing him. He often gave me inside information, always insisting we meet in plush Jakarta hotels over expensive lunches; sometimes he brought a friend. I’d come to know him quite well, and he gave me Paridah’s details with her permission. She agreed to an email interview. The 41-year-old lived in Malaysia with the couple’s six children, then aged between eight and twenty. Her youngest was chillingly named Osama.
Paridah followed the pattern of denying her husband was a terrorist, despite the fact he’d confessed to being operations chief of JI; he had ordered and planned the 2002 Bali bombings, and had ties to Osama bin Laden. Mukhlas had admitted to recruiting his brothers Amrozi and Ali Imron to help assemble and transport the bombs used in the attacks. How could she have been in the dark?
Paridah, who had worn the niqab since she was nineteen, described her husband as a mujahedin, a warrior perception shared by the couple’s six children. ‘My husband was not a terrorist. My children see their father as a mujahid, someone who fought for Islam in Afghanistan,’ she wrote in her email to me. Then, incredibly, she said, ‘As for the Bali bombing, we still believe that he is innocent, that he was not the planner-bomber, whatever the government accused him to be. My children see him as … a very good father, a genius in Islamic studies.’
When Mukhlas was executed in 2008, Paridah stayed at her mother-in-law’s house in Lamongan, East Java. ‘[I was] surrounded by his big family and my eldest son was with me. I read [the] Koran.’ A kindergarten teacher, she denied that her children, who attended a public school and studied Islamic knowledge, were motivated by violent jihad, or that JI has approached them, but ‘as Muslims, they do believe they should live in an Islamic state. We are grateful we’re living in Malaysia.’ The country’s dual legal system allows Muslims to live under a diluted version of sharia law.
Paridah didn’t mention that she had taught at the Luqmanul Hakiem school in the 1990s, a radical JI-run madrassa in Johor where her late husband had been master. Typically, JI wives were involved in accounting, fundraising and propaganda for the cause. As a single mother, she accessed government financial support and community help. In stark contrast to Titin’s life, Paridah’s seemed good; she said people were kind and helpful. When I asked her if the family was subjected to discrimination, she brushed off the question. ‘Alhamdulillah [praise to God], [we] have never been treated like that. We get full moral support from those who are aware [of their background]. I believe my husband’s good image and his way with the community help us a lot.’
I asked how she reconciled her Malaysian brother’s defection. Nasir Abas had evangelised on the evils of violent jihad since his jail release in 2004. His crime was an immigration violation, but his background was inextricably linked to Indonesia’s radical history. Now preaching prison deradicalisation programs for Indonesia’s National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT), he is denounced by his former cohorts as an infidel and traitor. ‘Nasir is my brother. For me, he is just doing what he thinks right. His activity has nothing to do with our relationship,’ Paridah emailed non-committedly.
In 2001 Abas had been anointed a top regional commander by jailed JI radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir. In his previous life he’d fought first in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and later in the southern Philippines where he’d trained the Bali bombers.
*
In Jakarta, my routine encompassed back-to-back interviews, some leading to spontaneous ones with top brass, experts, terrorists, and so on. This was the quirkiness I loved about Indonesia – the place was studded with possibilities. Anything could happen, and did.
On this occasion, my fixer Ronna and I drove to a squalid housing compound on the outskirts of East Jakarta for which we had been given the secret address. We wandered onto quiet dirt tracks where children peeped out from behind shacks as we picked our way towards the tightly packed hovels.
A wiry man called Rahmat was slicing up chickens in a shed to sell locally for a meagre income. Piles of headless, skinned chickens littered the ground in the blood-spattered shed off his house. Buckets of water were on the tiled floor amid a gory battlefield from which wafted a raw, nauseating smell. Rahmat kept hacking and slashing the chickens studiously, speaking in a monotone, barely glancing up.
He and his family lived in the secret compound for ex-terrorists released from jail. Authorities had asked me not to disclose its existence, fearing Jakarta residents would protest against jihadis living on their doorstep. Foreign journalists weren’t welcome here – Ronna and I entered cautiously, wearing headscarves and bearing gifts of hijabs for the women.
Rahmat had been radicalised by a desire to live in an Islamic state, and by his teacher Abu Bakar Bashir. The former JI member had been trained in Afghanistan by his friend Mukhlas in 1987. In the aftermath of the Bali bombing in 2003, he was rounded up with eight others and arrested. He’d spent ten days in jail.
In between his persistent chopping, he told us, ‘I still believe in violent jihad if there are threats to Muslims. If something happened in [the Christian-Muslim conflict zone] Poso again, it would be a trigger.’
His wife Suryati accepted our gift and invited us into the dingy home for tea. It formed part of the shanty town behind which incongruous high-rises soared. The whole impression was one of a bizarre movie set.
Like the other wives I’d spoken to, Suryati claimed she knew nothing of her husband’s radicalism. ‘Whatever he does is the right thing,’ she said. ‘I was shocked when he was arrested.’
Several of her young children hung off the chairs. The eldest, their thirteen-year-old daughter, was participating in the intergenerational spread and inculcation of radical Islam. ‘The older child knows of her father’s background,’ said Suryati. ‘She was five when he was arrested and now understands and is supportive. She shares his radical views because she goes to an Islamic boarding school. She is proud of her father’s dedication to radical Islam.’
The family of four children was included in Seto Mulyadi’s University of Indonesia program under the auspices of a Muslim orphanage supporting high-risk children of ex-terrorists. The children mixed anonymously with their peers, but the issue was sensitive and secretive, and I was forbidden from entering the orphanage.
Many kids fell outside the safety net. At Indonesia’s Ministry of Social Affairs, I learnt of a sweeping initiative involving about three hundred children of terrorists ‘to cut off the network’. It involved removing children from extremist enclaves, to undergo therapy. When they were considered normalised the children were slotted back into families, probably perpetuating the cycle.
In my efforts to understand more about the influence terrorists have on their children, I had also tried to reach Ali Imron’s wife, Nissa, but discovered she and her two children had retreated to a radical Islamic compound in East Java.
