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it made a bloody intervention in Jakarta’s port district of Tanjung Priok to break
up a protest involving usroh activists, killing dozens. Then, on the 21 January
1985, a former Ngruki lecturer bombed the massive 9th century Buddhist Stupa,
Borobudur, in Central Java. Shortly afterwards, the Indonesian Supreme Court
heard an appeal against Sungkar and Ba’asyir’s 1982 release from prison and
ruled in the prosecution’s favor, issuing summons for the pair. Upon hearing
this, Sungkar and Ba’asyir decided to make a hijrah, or strategic retreat, to
Malaysia. 14 Thus, in April 1985, Sungkar, Ba’asyir, and a small group of followers
left for Malaysia, as other Indonesians have done. 15 In the fifteen years that
followed, the Malaysian exiles kept close links via couriers with jemaah members
in Solo and Jakarta, where many BKPM members had moved after the arrest of
Irfan Awwas. A small community was also established in a shared house in the
district of Pisangan Lama in East Jakarta.
Shortly after settling in Malaysia, Sungkar and Ba’asyir travelled to Saudi Arabia
to seek funding for their community. Upon returning to Malaysia, the two
organized trips to Afghanistan for Southeast Asian recruits to fight against Soviet
occupation. The first small group of mujahidin made the trip in 1985. Thos
recruiting for the Afghan campaign hoped that large numbers of fighters would
come from Southeast Asia, but Sungkar and Ba’asyir were careful about who
they endorsed. The following year’s group, however, was as large as fifty or
sixty. We now understand that virtually all of the senior leadership of what
became Jemaah Islamiyah studied and trained between 1985 and 1995 in camps
in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. There
were many other Southeast Asians among the “Afghan alumni,” as they came to
be known, but only some of them later joined JI. Many of these non-JI alumni
nevertheless became trusted associates of JI in groups such as Darul Islam and its
related organizations, whether in West Java or South Sulawesi, smaller
independent groups, or somewhat more distant organizations such as the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) or the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) in the
Philippines. Some of those who became key figures in JI were also formally
inducted into al-Qa’ida itself, although this was not a common pattern, as al-
Qa’ida was very selective. Thus, friendships formed in Afghanistan/Pakistan
often bridged otherwise unconnected groups, such as JI and ASG, or MILF and
ASG, and laid the foundations for future collaboration.
14
The word hijrah invokes the example of the Prophet Muhammad’s retreat to Medina when the
people of Mecca turned against him and reject the message of God
15
Malaysia, a nation of 27 million citizens, is thought to have several million illegal “guest
workers”—mostly Indonesian—without valid travel documentation.
42