Bali bomb suspect Imam Samudra awaits execution for the 2002 Bali bombings. (Images based on Agence France-Presse photos)

The Second Front: Inside Asia’s Most Dangerous Terrorist Network
By Ken Conboy
Published by Equinox, 2006

The low-tech crump of terrorist bombs will continue in Southeast Asia – no one’s security zone seems broad enough

My review for The Nation, published on October 1.

The bombing of three Bali nightclubs a year ago today was a deafening signal that radical Islam had not been cowed by the clampdown following the Sari Club devastation of 2002. And the blasts continue, and get closer. When cleric Abu Bakar Bashir walked free this past June 14 after spending 25 months in jail for sanctioning the original Bali bombings, it was an indication, just as loud, of the authorities’ inability – or unwillingness – to stop Jemaah Islamiyah (JI).

Just what it is that shields Bashir and Osama bin Laden from the law will eventually be revealed to the public, one supposes, but for now, anyone seeking insight into JI and the reality of its threat to Southeast Asia is well advised to read “The Second Front”.

Thais living outside the shuddering South, and the foreigners among them, may teeter on apathy toward daily media reports about the violence there, but Ken Conboy’s 235-page study will undo their complacency. Long before the Hat Yai explosions last month, we came unnervingly close to reading in the papers that Pattaya bars and Bangkok embassies had been levelled, targets of Hambali while he was ensconced on Soi On Nut and in Ayutthaya’s Boon Yarak apartments, pictured here, before his August 2004 arrest in the latter refuge.

Fourteen-year Indonesia resident Conboy, who has previously authored “insider” books on that country’s Intelligence Service and Special Forces, currently runs a private security consultancy in Jakarta, but earlier had been with the Washington-based think tank Asian Studies Centre and was a visiting fellow at Chulalongkorn University.

For this book, he has scoured press reports and official documents and interviewed many individuals, unearthing a slew of details previously unpublished.

He tracks JI’s evolution from its birth as the pathological child of Darul Islam, fighting the state alongside and then as the enemy of Sukarno, through its baptism of blood among the mujahedeen of Afghanistan and its apprenticeship with al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

Still questioned in some news media, JI’s links with al-Qaeda – and with the MILF in the Philippines – are acutely etched here. Conboy leaves no doubt about the extent of the brotherhood of blood and its vilification of the West, seen as the only obstacle to building a conservative Islamic superstate in Southeast Asia. Until the West bows to sharia law, Bashir has said, it will be punished.

The key characters of this chilling front emerge in bold relief from the shadows of conspiracy and the fragments of crime scenes. There is the scholarly explosives assembler Azhari bin Husin; and Abdul Rassul Sayyaf, who trained scores of Southeast Asians to fight; Abdul Rahim Ayub, who carried the mission to Australia; and from the Middle East, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, known as KSM, who went whoring in Manila with his blood-stained nephew Ramzi Youssef after the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing and became JI’s mentor and source of funding.

There are also the small-time soldiers who pray and press the button, like Asmar Latin Sani, whose severed head, found amid the carnage of the 2003 Marriott hotel bombing, reappears in the pages of photographs in the book, mangled by hatred and then pieced back together in a bid to identify him.

And, most graphically, there is the al-Qaeda proxy Hambali. “No McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Hambali told his co-conspirators. He was not proscribing a fast-food diet – he wanted to blow up big, important targets, not burger joints.

Carefully dividing up the “rice” – as they codenamed the tens of thousands of dollars couriered to Southeast Asia from Pakistan (to Bangkok via Narathiwat) – Hambali turned away with regret from the heavily fortified embassies and assessed alternative targets in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

“He very much wanted to lash out at Thailand,” Conboy writes. “He had already sent his lieutenants to case Bangkok’s Don Muang International Airport, where he noted that Israeli tourists tended to congregate at a bus stop near the arrival hall after every El Al flight … Another possible target was one of the Israeli restaurants in Bangkok’s budget tourist district … Finally, Hambali contemplated a spoiling attack a week ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference slated for Bangkok in mid-October [2004].”

Only the lack of ready materials and martyrs at that point stopped him from putting a bomb in a backpack. In the meantime, he travelled between Thailand and Cambodia seeking security in the form of fake passports.

“The Second Front” thoroughly audits the gains made by anti-terrorist authorities from America to Australia – the Thai police too – but does not rein up on the many opportunities missed by regional governments. Their next big chance, clearly, will involve tracking down Noordin Mohammed Top, now in charge of JI but seemingly, for now, as elusive as the wind.

Bashir strode out of prison in June claiming to have washed his hands of the movement – and promptly returned to Pondok Pesantren Ngruki, the Islamic boarding school he founded, a known school for terrorists. Time is on their side.