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was Dulmatin, the most wanted terrorist in Southeast Asia, and the
leader of the group. He was shot dead on 9 March, in an internet café in
Tangerang, Banten.⁵
In the following months more information became gradually avail-able.⁶ The group, it turned out, had split off from the Jemaah Islamiyah
(ji), an infamous jihadi organisation commonly linked to Al Qaeda and
led by the radical cleric Abu Bakar Baʾasyir. Apparently, Dulmatin, one
of the masterminds behind the deadly terrorist attack on Bali in 2002,
had become alienated from the movement. Since 2006 he and a number
of like-minded persons had concluded that the jihadi struggle had gone
astray, and that it was necessary to develop ‘a new programme that could
unite the jihadi community’.⁷ The training camp in Aceh revealed the
existence of a new coalition which, besides Dulmatin, included well-
known radical Islamists from Java and elsewhere, as well as a handful of
local Acehnese who were sympathetic to the jihadi cause. The group was
heavily armed and had considerable knowledge of the terrain around
Jantho. When the police secured the site of the training camp they
encountered weapons, books about ‘global jihad’, and dvds related to the
Bali bombings. During the investigation the police ‘speculated that the
militants were preparing to fight in Palestine and did not have a domestic
Indonesian agenda’.⁸
The choice of Aceh to start a training camp was not particularly smart.
It appears that Dulmatin and his group were looking for a ‘secure base’
for their operations. They chose Aceh as a location, first, because the
successful guerrilla actions of gam had made Aceh look like suitable
terrain for underground activities and, second, because Aceh seemed like
fruitful ground for recruitment as a result of the local implementation
of Sharia law.⁹ Both assumptions were wrong. War-torn Aceh was not
a great place to walk around with guns. Attempts to involve known
radical religious teachers failed hopelessly, at least partly because of the
uncompromising way in which the leaders of the cell rejected Acehnese
International Crisis Group, ‘Indonesia: Jihadi surprise in Aceh’, Asia Report
No. 189, 20 April 2010, 12.
An authoritative analysis can be found in ibid.
Ibid., 1.
us Embassy, ‘Aceh police action nets four militants, estimated 50 at large in
jungle’, http://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10JAKARTA254_a.html (accessed
3 November 2013). Indeed, this was most likely one of the coalition’s goals,
although the plan to send trained Indonesian jihadis to Gaza had apparently
already been cancelled in early 2009. See International Crisis Group, ‘Indonesia:
Jihadi surprise in Aceh’, 9.
Ibid., 7–8.